


Sunrise

by ravenously



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Cannibalism, Canonical Character Death, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drugs, Gore, Mentions of Suicidal Ideations/Attempts, Wendigo, Wendigo Josh, big tough wendigo taking care of fledgling, my bois tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-28 14:00:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 22,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5093378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenously/pseuds/ravenously
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris falls down the mines after an ill-advised and likely drunken decision to visit the mountain that he lost everything at just over a month ago. He expects to die a lonely and painful death, especially after he's carried to one of the Wendigo's lairs. He expects to be eaten, to be lost like everything else on this godforsaken mountain. </p><p>The wendigo turns out to be a half-turned Josh, who seems to hold a semblance of humanity still in him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Evening.

He’s pretty sure his leg is broken. He can’t  _see_  it, not from this angle, not from how dark the cavern is, but he can feel it. It’s an eerie sort of pain. The kind that blares sirens in his mind that not only is something messed up, but things are potentially beyond repair. Chris whimpers when he tries to move it, shift so he can actually see the damage, and excruciating pain shoots up and down the entirety of the leg’s length. Tingling hell moving down into his feet, nerves crackling lightning all the way up his thigh.

It’s so hard not to scream. But he can’t, he’s gotta stay as quiet as possible. Especially since he can- He’s pretty sure he’s bleeding. Not just from the various scrapes and cuts he gathered while running through the forest, falling down. No, he’s pretty sure there’s a pool of blood under his leg and he just can’t feel it yet, due to how over-fucking-whelmed his nerves are.

Fucking howling wendigos. Fucking- Fuck them.

Not for the first time since he came here, he regrets his choices.

It’s been a month since the…. Incident, and only now have the cops stopped bugging them. Has his parents started to leave him alone. Since the cloying cards and flowers have stopped arriving at both his house… And Josh’s. And everyone’s else’s empty, melancholy houses. He’s been alone in his trauma for a month, pretending he’s okay. Pretending that everyone can still be- That everything’s normal and  _alive._

Which is a lie.

He’s been in a proverbial  _bubble_  for a month. A bubble of cloying softness and ‘It’s okay, it’ll all be okay,’ when no. No it would  _never_  be okay again. How can it?

Chris huffs and tries to fidget in a more comfortable position that won’t shoot pain up his spine. Now it definitely won’t be okay. He’s gonna die out here, be some predator’s food. Be- Be a wendigo’s meal. Fuck. He should never have- It was idiotic, really.

Just coming here was stupid. The lodge wasn’t even around, considering the explosion. Just the basement and the tunnels. He should have turned tail after driving up here. Left it alone, grieved in his car and pretended he was okay. Like everyone wants him to. Pretend he’s okay, like he hasn’t been breaking apart since he watched Josh cut himself in half (even if that wasn’t real it- It. Was the first straw).

What was he expecting? Closure from seeing the death grounds of every one of his friends? From revisiting the mountain that holds most of his trauma?

Considering he’s stuck at the bottom of a cavern and is unable to move, he’s starting to think he should have just continued to pretend he was fine, pretended for their sake, if not his. ‘Cause now he’s gonna die, and it’s all because he couldn’t leave the fact that he  _never saw Josh die._  It’s almost worse, in a way, compared to the- The others. He saw them. He had confirmation. He knows- He  _saw_  them all die, and even thinking about it makes his mind curl up and shrink in fear and anguish and disgust and- Everything, but at least he  _knows_.

He doesn’t know about Josh. He never saw him. Just knows he’s in the mines, he could be lying dead and emaciated somewhere, something’s meal for the night, or he could be-

There’s a shriek. It’s like the wendigo’s noises only…. Smaller, more contained. More human.

Chris whimpers again, his heart beating fast and his mind wrapped up in panic. This is worse than- He can’t even  _move._  How can he be expected to even have hope when he can’t even  _move?_  Fuck,  _fuck,_  he’s dead where he stands, and suddenly he’s got the Stranger’s voice in his head reminding him about how the Wendigo’s love to play with their food, keep them alive for so  _long_ , so fucking long, just to keep the flesh fresh.

There’s scrabbling on the rock outcrop above him, the sound of nails digging into small spaces. This wendigo is louder than the others he remembers, clumsier, but. Maybe he’s wrong. It has been a month of him trying to repress the fact that everyone he’s friends with is dead.

He tries to scoot backwards, into a crevice against the wall. His leg cries out and nearly causes him to verbalize that pain. It’s taking every ounce of his consciousness to move without screaming, and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s so dark; He can barely see, but he can hear the thump of something jumping down, the outline of an inching body.

Chris stops moving and frowns because the wendigo doesn’t look like one, even in the piss-poor lighting. It looks more human than anything else, and then he can feel its  _breath_ , oh god, sniffing his face and smelling like rot and blood and dirt. His eyes snap shut.

He can’t help the whimper that escapes his throat, and he slits his eyes open to see the wendigo tilting its head. He thinks. There’s- The thing has hair still, and he peers closer, trying to. He wants to know who’s going to kill him. Which is impossible, considering he’s in a pitch black cavern without his glasses. Fuck. He thinks he might be crying. There’s already trails of tears going down his cheek from the pain of his leg, but a fresh wave start to leak. From fear. Anguish. Everything culminating into a shaking mess known as Chris.

Chris freezes when he feels something wet and warm on his cheek, and it takes another second of the feeling to realize it’s the wendigo’s  _tongue._  He’s disgusted, but. A tongue is better than teeth. He’s being licked like a human popsicle by a wendigo.

And it’s making a  _noise_. A rumbling, deep in its throat that’s like- “Are you  _purring?_ ” Okay, so asking it is inappropriate; he’s probably going to die now. But it’s so unexpected that he can’t help it. He’s always had issues with keeping his mouth shut. There’s been many a scenario where he’s gotten in trouble because of his motor mouth.

The wendigo pulls back and tilts his head, then gives this high keen and suddenly? Suddenly Chris is panting and crying out in pain, his head a swirl of anguish so thick it causes his mental awareness to blanket in a stream of white and black static. He thinks? The wendigo is picking him up, holding him close to its body in a bridal carry. But he honestly couldn’t say.

He’s not really aware of anything until he’s dumped on the cool cave floor and the pain in his leg is able to mellow out. Not go away completely, never that, but at least stagnant into something his mind can process without going overboard.

When he’s able to take stock of everything, he hears scrabbling and can just make out the back image of the wendigo leaving the cavern, before he’s left alone to wallow in his…. Prison?

This cavern is lighter at least. More of an open space, while still being sufficiently dark for something nocturnal like a wendigo to bear. Chris takes stock of himself, first. Verifies that the rest of his body is okay, then thumbs along his skin to looks for scrapes and cuts. Anything that he should worry about getting infected.

Nothing is  _horrible,_  but when he gets down to his leg and slowly, carefully works on feeling it out, he hisses just by brushing his fingers along the puffy skin. It’s not bad enough that the bone snapped through his skin or anything, but there are jagged cuts near the break. That’s where the blood must have come from. He carefully removes his boot, hissing as he eases his jeans up and over his knee. No need for denim to get caught in any of the cuts and further spurn on the infection.

He shifts and moves slowly so he can sit against the rough rock of the wall, letting himself just. Breathe. Breathe and think and take stock in what’s likely to happen.

Okay.

So he’s going to die. That much is obvious. The wendigo was licking his cheek like he was the tastiest meal in the world. He wishes he’d die sooner, rather than later. It’s going to be agonizing if the wendigo takes its time. Maybe it’s his penance. He was the only survivor, the only one to make it off the mountain. Maybe it was fate that drew him back here, to finally seal the deal and give him what he deserves.

He lets out a shaky breath, his heart feeling like it’s going to leap out of his body. Now that he’s sitting, whatever reserves of energy he had left are fucking gone, and he can feel his body slowly shutting down. It’s trying to numb him from the pain of his leg, from the most moral realization that he’s gonna die. It’s-

He huffs and verifies that the wendigo isn’t back, then feels his eyes sliding shut. He’ll figure something out later.

\--

He wakes to a mouth full of cotton, and he’s pretty sure his breath smells so bad he can  _taste_  it. God knows he can’t smell it, though, considering he blinks his eyes open to the wendigo  _right fucking there_  in his face, and  _oh god_  it smells like death and rot. He gags, and then gags some more when he catches sight of the strips of meat and gore in its teeth.

Chris pushes his face back and stares wildly and that’s when it hits him. When he can actually look past the glazed over, filmy eyes and bloodied, jagged teeth. His breath catches in his throat, any of his protests dying immediately. _“Josh?”_

No. No, it can’t be. It just- It can’t. But. It is, he’d know that face  _anywhere_ , even covered in gore. He feels a sob try to wrench itself from his throat and he covers it up by pushing at Josh’s face, trying to get him to back the fuck off. Surprisingly, Josh shuffles backwards, his head tilted in an animalistic caricature of confusion.

Chris stares and tries not to cry. He pushes everything away- his emotions, his thoughts, his physical fear at being this close to something his brain registers as a monster. He pushes it all down with a soft breath, instead focusing on Josh himself. Observe, Chris, damnit.

Josh is still in those damn overalls from his stupid  _fucking_  prank. Loose-fitting and making him look bigger than he really is. They’re torn in places, as though for easier mobility, and in others, it just looks like he got into fights (and he really doesn’t want to know who he got into fights  _with_ ). Especially considering the places where the fabric of the overalls cling to his body with dried blood, that’s a safe bet.

He’s barefoot, and his feet have begun to…. Mutate. Chris isn’t exactly sure what the end-game here is, but the way his feet seem to be slowly elongated, the toes curling downwards into claws, he can only imagine it’ll be something that make it easier for him to climb like the fully-formed wendigos.

His hands are grotesque, curled at the knuckles and the fingers elongating outwards into long claws. They’re still shorter than the fully-transformed ones, but it’s disgusting and dangerous nonetheless. One of those claws could kill Chris in a heartbeat. One slash and boom. _Dead._ No more Chris.

It takes Chris a second to steel himself to look at his friend’s face. The rest of his body is easy to isolate from the reality that it’s  _Josh,_  easier to just compartmentalize body features such as  _feet_  and  _hands_. But his face? It’s-

It’s the worst off. His normally emotionally honest and  _full_  eyes are almost completely blank, clouded over with a white film. Chris remembers that Wendigos can’t really see, can really only visualize movement. Maybe it’s because they live in caves like these. Hardly need picture-perfect sight in such dismal conditions.

It hurts Chris to see his eyes so blank. There’s- He thinks there’s a  _little_  recognition, but that could be a trick of the light. He doesn’t know, but the playful energy that Josh has always had is just….  _Missing._ Gone.

There’s large bruises under his eyes, like he hasn’t been sleeping. Maybe has hasn’t- Chris isn’t sure how much Wendigos sleep, but maybe the sleep patterns are all messed up while Josh is still partially human. There’s a deep gouge under the right eye, causing the skin underneath to be puffy and red. It’s gotta hurt. In fact, the amount of cuts and bruises all over his body have to hurt, but he’s made no sound of pain since Chris has been awake.

There’s a few bruises and cuts on his forehead and cheeks, but none look too bad. Only one looks deep enough to really smart, and the angry edges worry Chris. He doesn’t want Josh to get an infection. Especially if he barely reacts to it, too far gone, mentally, to even care about his physical condition.

By far the worst part of him is his mouth. His mouth is hanging slightly open in a constant grimace. All the teeth have been sharpened, growing grotesque and misshapen on the left side. In fact, the entire mouth has been ripped open in a horrific facsimile of a Joker’s grin, allowing room for the jagged fangs. The skin is still raw and red; clearly this has been a recent, ongoing addition to Josh’s terrible transformation.

Chris pushes the bile that’s threatening to rise in his throat down. He can’t lose it right now. Not when he’s not sure how lucid Josh is, how human. He needs to keep his wits about him, be rational be- Be. Something. He doesn’t know. Somehow, he’s gotta get out of here. Help Josh.

“Hey, Josh, it’s me buddy. Chris. It- uh- Don’t eat me. Right? I mean, you brought me here without killing me so that’s gotta mean something right? I mean-”

He’s cut off when a clawed hand covers his mouth, stopping the stream of words in an instant. Chris’ eyes widen in fear, terrified that Josh’s predator mind has had enough of him, that he’s going to die and be his  _best friend’s meal_  and how fucked up is that, but. But. It just seems that Josh was curious about the words. Wanted to stop him from making them.

Chris swallows and Josh tracks the movement slowly with his eyes, pupils darting to the place on his neck where the pulse is just about visible. Josh makes another purring noise, then leans in, moving his hand so he can gnaw at Chris’ neck.

He stays abso-fucking-lutely still while Josh continues to gnaw on him, whimpering only a little when he feels the skin break. Josh’s tongue laps up his blood slowly, like a goddamn vampire. He’s not actively…  _maiming_  Chris, though. This isn’t what he expected. He expected a lot more decapitation or arm wrenching. Not… Weird kinky blood sucking. Especially when Josh all but climbs into Chris’s lap a moment later.

Well, tries.

Chris cries out in pain when Josh pushes his weight onto his broken leg, a wail that rises up without his consent at the sudden black-out levels of pain. Josh scrambles off immediately, like he’s sorry, licking his decimated lips to get the last droplets of Chris’ blood. He whines, actually whines like a fucking animal, perched onto his haunches.

He doesn’t look worried. But he does look confused, and a moment later, he’s sniffing the air and then pushing forward to nose at Chris’ broken leg.

“What the fuck? Get away. You’ve already- Fuck- you’ve already fuckin’ hurt it. Josh, back  _up_.” He tries to push at Josh again, hoping that he’ll move back like he did the first time, but all he’s met with is a vaguely threatening growl, deep in his throat.

“Okay! Okay, fine. Fuck.” Chris leans back against the rock and watches warily as Josh sniffs his leg, then starts licking the wounds where the dried blood has finally stopped pooling up. Chris tries to stop him from doing that but- It. It feels good. The saliva is cleaning the wounds somehow. He wonders if their saliva has a healing factor, if Josh is even far enough turned to have that or if he’s just making shit up in his delirium and fear.

“You just- You just have fun there.” Chris ends up murmuring, and tries to ignore the chirrup he gets in reply. At least Josh isn’t actively hurting him, and isn’t sucking blood out of his neck anymore. He can deal with a little wound cleanup. Maybe his saliva is clean enough to help stave off infection. He doubts it, what with the bits of flesh and meat and nasty fucking gore in Josh’s mouth, but it’s worth a small shot of hope in the dark.

It’s all he’s got right now.

Josh is a half-crazed cannibalistic monster, Chris is stuck in a cavern as his prisoner, and he’s got no way or hope to ever get out. A little hope for a non-painful and infected wound is justified.

He’s cut off from his thinking when his leg is straightened, a scream wrenching itself from his throat. Numbly, he thinks his voice is breaking, getting scratchier from all the abuse it’s gone through the past few… Hours? How long was he sleeping for?

Chris pants and tries to move away, but Josh just growls again, his clawed hand moving in almost gentle patterns as he tries to move Chris’ leg in a natural way of bending.

“It-  _fuck_ \- It needs a splint, you dumbass. You’re gonna fuck it up more.” Chris manages to gasp out breathlessly. He’s pretty sure his lungs are only working in small little pants and gasps. Or maybe he’s just panicking and going into shock from the pain. Regardless, it’s a little hard to breathe, and Josh keeps  _prodding him._

By the time Josh has finished… Doing whatever the hell he thought was so damn important to Chris’ leg, Chris is practically unconscious, barely awake as he pants and huffs. His protests died out five minutes ago, and the only reason he’s still awake is some instinctual fear that if he sleeps, Josh will eat him.

He’s barely aware of Josh scooting closer, hardly aware of a warm weight on his body, carefully arranged so it’s not hurting his leg. The warmth, after so many hours of the freezing cave, is so unexpected that whatever last-minute reserves of consciousness Chris had fail him, and his eyes slide shut. He hears a soft huff, and conceptualizes that Josh is laying on top of his body, nose pushed deep into his neck, before he feels the darkness overtake his brain, leaving behind all of the pain and emotional trauma of the waking world.

 


	2. Dusk

Chris wakes up with a confused groan. For a moment, he forgets where he is, can almost pretend he’s back home in his lonely little bed. Lonely, but warm. Which is what tips him off. His back hurts from leaning against the rock, his leg throbs even when nothing is touching it. He’s cold, but. Not as cold as he could be.

And Josh is rubbing the top of his head against Chris’ chest.

“Man, what the fuck? You keep getting weirder and weirder. I swear.” He tries not to flinch when Josh looks up at him with his cloudy eyes, tries to still his instinctual fear at seeing such long  _teeth_. He’s pretty sure it’s going to take a while to get over such mindless reactions to predatory features. Chris sort of hopes he doesn’t get to the point where this  _is_  normal.

Josh chirrups again, a strange chattering noise he seems to make when he’s…. Happy? At least content. He leans forward to rub his head against the fabric of Chris’ coat again, and Chris chances his fingers to lean down and pull Josh back. He’s met with a growl, until his fingers smooth over Josh’s head. There’s…. Bumps. Little knobby bumps on the top of his head, a good inch and a half into his hairline. Josh purrs when Chris rubs a thumb over one of them, leaning into the touch immediately.

“What  _are_  these? Are they- Are you growing  _horns_?” He didn’t think the wendigos even  _had_  those. Maybe it’s like a deer- they shed them throughout the year. What purpose would those have, though? As far as he can tell, the wendigo isn’t a  _species_ , but a cursed human. Fuck, these things are gross and weird.

“Hurts.” Josh whispers through a shredded throat. Chris almost mistakes it for another of his noises, the sound so garbled and abstract. But. No, that was definitely a word. Chris stops touching his hair for a moment, frowning and staring at Josh. Evidently, his stare is intense, because Josh looks up after a while, looking as though he’s attempting to focus with his milky eyes and absolutely failing.

“...Do they, now? I think they’re growing. Makes sense they’d be sore. Does- Rubbing them help with that?” Oh, he’s well aware that he should be a screaming shivering mess right now. The only reason he’s cognizant, he’s pretty sure, is that he’s numb from everything that’s happened. Maybe it’s shock. Maybe he’ll break down and be a blubbering mess later.

Josh blinks slowly at him and then pushes his head into Chris’ hand, as though demanding more touches. It’s…. Oddly like a cat, and if it weren’t for the smell of death and murder radiating off of him, Chris could almost conceptualize this in a non-insane, non-fucked up way.

Chris isn’t actually sure that Josh can understand him. It seems obvious to him, now, that at the very least, Josh isn’t interested in killing him. He’s taking care of him, is treating him less like a meal and more like a… Well, friend feels wrong, almost. But he’s not- The other wendigos didn’t exhibit any of this surprising gentleness.

Maybe it’s because he hasn’t transformed all the way.

Maybe it’s just a Josh thing.

He pets through Josh’s messy, greasy hair for a while, rubbing the nubs of his growing horns and tries not to think about how weird his life has become. Josh’s eyes droop after a while, content enough to be a heavy weight on Chris’ body again.

“Hey, can, uh, I mean. If you’re gonna  _keep_  me here, I’m gonna need water. And food. And maybe something to splint my leg with. I mean, preferably, let’s go back to the, uh, basement, since it’s actually got  _stuff_ there.” He’s babbling. He hasn’t stopped babbling since he was brought here. But usually, Josh babbled with him, geeked out over inane little thing just like Chris and now there’s- Nothing but the odd animalistic noise. He tries not to think too hard about the loss.

Josh looks slowly up at him, pulling back enough that Chris can’t keep rubbing the spots on his head. He blinks, and seems to be thinking extremely hard, like it’s so difficult to stay present and actually hear Chris. Maybe it is. Maybe the predator brain that is slowly wrapping around Josh’s entire visage makes human characteristics  _hard._

For the first time since he made it to the cave, Chris thanks the goddamn universe for letting his captor be a semi-human Josh who seems to vaguely remember him. If it had been any of the other wendigos, or a Josh more transformed, he would have been dead already. No asking for water or splints for him.

“Food… Meat?” Josh’s terrible record scratch of a voice cuts Chris out of his thoughts, surprise dancing along his consciousness at the fact that Josh can still talk at all. Well, language is one of those pesky things that tends to stay in the brain. He’s just lucky that Josh can maybe understand him.

“Uh. Well. Not your kind of meat, bud. I  _really_ don’t wanna be turning into something like you, and I still got my moral principles and-” Josh is already scooting backwards, rubbing his head once more against Chris’ chest before he stands up and shakes out his limbs to stretch. Chris isn’t even sure if he’s listening to him, but he continues anyways. “But uh. I wouldn’t turn down an  _animal_ meal. Don’t suppose you’d let me start a fire in here, huh. You already scared of that shit? Josh?”

Josh is moving through the cavern, but at the sound of his name, he turns to look at Chris, focuses in as much as he can with his fucked up eyes. “Hunt.” Is all he manages to get out, before he’s scaling one of the rock faces and moving out of the cavern.

Chris huffs as soon as he’s gone, murmuring, “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t expect me to throw a party if you drag a frozen body in here.”

He gets a mild shriek in reply, and then Josh is gone. He can hear him howling and shrieking for a few minutes afterwards, the sounds reverberating throughout the tunnels of the mines. Chris wonders why the fuck he’s screaming, but. Maybe it’s a territorial thing. Him and the others might have gotten the shaft of the stick, with all the wendigos coming after them at once but… It seems they’re normally loners. By themselves. Maybe the shrieking is a way to say  _this is my area, don’t disrupt it._

Chris is curious if the other wendigos, however many are left, even respect Josh’s screams yet. They don’t sound entirely inhuman yet. Still enough of the human man is threaded into his voice to sound almost  _weaker_ than the other eerie screeches he hears occasionally. Chris isn’t complaining, though. The more humanity, the better.

Now that he’s awake, he takes the time to look around the cavern again. It’s not as empty as he thought it was before. There’s a pile of… Something near one of the corners. If he could guess, Chris would say they were animal pelts? Almost a dozen of them, piled roughly in a circle. Maybe that’s where Josh sleeps. Some weird fucked up, gory nest.

He’s pretty sure the other corner is filled with the bones of Josh’s previous meals, though, so the nest isn’t too disgusting.

With Josh gone, it’s much harder to just… Push everything away and focus on the immediate stimulation at hand. There’s nothing, now, and Chris can’t even stand or move to at least pretend he’s not bored and on the border of freaking out.

Now that Josh is gone, he can really  _think_  about what he’s lost. What a- Josh is  _gone._  He really should stop thinking of that thing as Josh. It’s a wendigo, it’s going to turn into a wendigo, and it’s eventually going to eat Chris. Eat him and not even remember who the fuck Chris was. Chris will be nothing more than a momentary meal in an endless chase to curb the hunger that the curse forces on Josh.

Chris stabs his fists against his eyes, trying to stop the tears that are threatening to leak out.

For all intents and purposes, Josh Washington is dead. For all intents and purposes, so is Chris, but it’s- For some reason, it’s much sadder, much more horrifying to think about Josh’s death.

Josh may have been one of the least stable people that Chris knew, but he was. Somehow he was always there. A rock. His personality, his stability may have been wavering, but his friendship and his presence was constant. He’s been around since Chris and him have been fucking _kids_  for christ’s sake.

And now, just like everyone else, he’s dead. No, worse than dead. Because Chris can tell there’s parts of Josh left. Little bits of his humanity, of the person he used to be. And it’s all going to disappear, slowly but surely, until there’s nothing but a starving monster left.

One late night, when the guise of darkness and night time begets a perfect condition to tell secrets, to pour your heart out to someone you trust, Josh told Chris his greatest fear is to be alone. Mumbled that there’s so much going on in his head, that he’s pretty sure he’d go fucking batshit if left to his own devices.

Chris hopes for Josh’s sake, then, that he keeps him alive as long as possible. Not for Chris. Not for his sake or his life, because he knows that Josh will snap one day and eat him, or he’ll die of malnutrition or  _something_. But. The point is, he hopes Josh keeps him alive for as long as possible. Chris is Josh’s last connection to himself, the last person outside of Josh’s brain to keep him even a little human.

Take that away, and Chris is pretty sure Josh will stop trying.

Chris huffs out a wet breath, chest heaving as he finally lets the sobs overtake him. It’s hopeless. He’s hopeless, the entire fucking situation is hopeless.

\--

He cries and hates himself and the world for god knows long. He can’t even keep track of time down here. He only becomes aware of his surroundings when he hears the telltale scrabbling of Josh’s climbing. He hurriedly tries to dry his eyes and cheeks, make himself look like he wasn’t breaking down two seconds ago. Not that he’s sure Josh will even understand what the tears mean.

Josh takes longer than Chris expects, but it becomes obvious when the body of a young stag is dropped into the middle of the cavern floor, with Josh scrabbling down after it. He looks at the body and then stands and looks at Chris, chest puffing out like he’s immensely proud of himself. Shouldn’t be, considering the pile of furs over in the corner suggest he’s hunted deer and even wolves before, but this little posture show is clearly for Chris’ benefit.

“Show off.” He says, and works on rolling his eyes and smirking. Bantering, like the world isn’t about to end and Josh can understand him.

Josh huffs at his words and then slowly drags the deer carcass closer to Chris, stopping only when the dead animal’s tongue is nearly touching his bare foot. Chris grimaces and tries to scoot back a little, causing pain to spread through his leg again. Damn.

“I appreciate the gift, bro, but what exactly do you expect me to do with this?” He’s not like Josh; He can’t just mindlessly eat raw fucking meat. He doesn’t even know how to cut it open! Even if he had a knife, he’d be hopeless.

“Eat.” Josh replies matter-of-factly, the word ending with a soft whine as he focuses in on Chris’ face. He’s not sure how blind Josh is, but he must be able to see enough to realize that Chris isn’t happy.

_“How?”_

Josh looks down to Chris’ blunt hands, blinks, and then nods. He puffs his chest out again, like it’s something to be proud of, being able to provide for his ineffectual, clawless human.

Which is all nice and good _in theory_ , but then Josh starts  _ripping_  into the deer, tearing flesh in wet rips that sound throughout the cavern, and it makes Chris nauseous. He gags, trying to push both Josh and the deer away, shaking his head violently. “Nope. Nope. Hey, remember when I almost went vegetarian after that documentary about the meat industry? Yeah, this is eighteen times worse.  _Josh.”_

Josh just growls at him and pushes a hand out to keep Chris from actually doing any damage to him, or even moving him. It works; Josh is by far stronger than Chris, considering the wendigo spirit.  _“Eat.”_

Chris gets it. He can’t eat anything unless it’s torn apart into human-size bites. But there’s something awful about Josh tearing into a creature with his bare hands and teeth, blood and visceral smearing stickily all over his face and clothes. He’s not just cutting the meat up, either. He’s eating it, making soft hums and hungry moans as he rips into intestines and organs, slurps slithery bits of meat and flesh into his mouth.

“Man, fuck. Fuck, I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.” Chris mumbles. He’d puke if there was anything in his stomach. As it is, he feels bile come up his throat a couple times.

“....Hungry?” Josh blinks up at him, tongue darting out to gather the blood under his lip up. He looks confused, like it’s impossible to not be hungry. For him, that’s probably true. That marks the wendigo. Constant hunger. An endless race to quench and satisfy and never, ever being complete.

He gathers a handful of bite-size slivers of meat that he cut for Chris, moving to sit carefully on his lap again. It’s fucking weird how comfortable he is doing this. The old Josh, the- Chris swallows the lump in his throat- human Josh, would have blushed just brushing hands with his. This is a whole other mess of intimacy.

When Chris refuses to put the sliver of meat in his mouth, Josh grabs his jaw with one clawed hand and shoves the meat into his mouth with the other, not willing to take any argument. Chris gags at the taste, almost spitting it back into Josh’s face. Josh, for his part, just keens and purrs, like that will make  _any_ of this okay.

As soon as he swallows, Josh shoves another piece into his mouth, and on and on until Chris is certain he’s eaten the equivalent of a huge fucking steak of raw meat. His stomach isn’t happy- It feels like it’s going to reject the entire meal any second. Combined with his other pains and discomfort, he’s a barely-cognizant mess when Josh finishes feeding him. He started crying halfway through the meal, tears prickling at being forced into eating something so vile.

But then it’s  _done_ , finished, and Chris blinks as Josh moves off his lap to finish his own meal. Watches in numb and horrified fascination as Josh picks off a good half of the deer in one sitting, a mindless, insatiable monster. He doesn’t eat like a man. It’s a frenzied, desperate meal. Any of the soft humanity that he holds for Chris is gone, replaced with animal stupidity.

It makes Chris want to cry again.

He doesn’t, holds it together enough to manage not to make a fool of himself _again,_  but it does shock him into almost… A state of not being there. He can’t really feel much except for his stomach groaning mentally at him, his emotions far away and his internalization of everything slow and murky. He hardly even realizes when Josh finishes his meal and picks Chris up, not until his foot bangs against a rock on the floor and it shoots pain up the swollen flesh of his leg.

He grunts and shakes and blinks, like he’s being jerked back into his own body. He’s actually  _there_  when Josh carefully arranges him on the furs of his nest, so careful and gentle (and isn’t that such a funny image, compared to the blood stained desperation Chris _just_  saw) not to fuck his leg up.

The furs smell. Some of the lower ones, the bottom ones, still have flesh attached to them. The more recent ones are neater, closer to actual fur blankets. The quality is indicative of Josh’s claws and teeth and how sharp they’ve gotten. How precise.

Chris ignores the smell, but he grimaces when Josh moves to lay down on his lap, the blood-stained denim squelching grossly on his coat.

“No. Nuh-uh. You’re not fucking up my clothes, too. Take the overalls off,  Josh.”

Josh just blinks at him, uncomprehending, until Chris leans forward and snaps one of the overall’s straps against Josh’s shoulder. “Off.”

That gets a slow blink. Josh slowly slides off of Chris’ lap and clumsily tries to undo the buttons with his hands, eventually getting frustrated and just… Ripping the fabric in half. He’s pretty sure the denim is going to be added to the nest pile when the blood has dried, but for now, Josh is good and throws the strips a few feets away from the nest. It’s a little awkward, considering Josh evidently decided not to wear real pants under his ridiculous Murder-costume, and is now just in his button-down and boxers, but.

It’s not the weirdest part of today.

“Thank you. I don’t want to smell like deer guts.” Chris says when Josh comes back to lay his body against Chris again.

He gets a few curious sniffs at that, some confirmation that Josh can at least partially understand him. Especially when Josh shakes his head, rubs the nubs of his velvety horns against his coat, and says, “Chris.”

Chris is surprised, and can’t help the smile that breaks out on his face. Yeah, yeah, he told Josh his name, but. No, this is Josh remembering. It has to be. And well, “Yeah, I guess I do smell like myself. Is it a good smell?”

He doesn’t get a nod or a yes or even a no, but he does get a purring half-wendigo in his lap, so he’s gonna take an affirmative anyways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come find me on [Tumblr.](buckycurtis.tumblr.com)
> 
> Hope you enjoy.


	3. Twilight

At some point during the evening, Josh gets up from his strange cuddling session and leaves Chris to himself again, presumably wandering the mines. At least, that’s what Chris thinks. He can occasionally hear his shrieking calls, and even less frequently, the more ethereal responses of the fully-fledged wendigos.

Chris busies himself with rearranging the nest so it’s less… Disgusting. Some of the gorier pelts get tossed several feet away. Warm they may be, but Chris isn’t getting good sleep thinking about the visceral rotten meat hanging on the bottom of them.

If he’s going to be Josh’s pretty human prisoner, he’s gonna make the best of it.

Being so limited in his movements, it takes him way longer than it should to sort out the nest. Which is honestly fine by him, considering he’s utterly, completely bored out of his goddamn mind just sitting here.

Three pelts get thrown off to the side, and underneath a couple of the newer ones, he finds old and rotting cloth. Maybe old clothes from the miners? He’s not sure, but it smells worse than the rotting animal flesh, so those get thrown to the ‘discard’ pile, as well.

Maybe he can ask Josh to clean the pelts off better, in a way Chris feels more comfortable with. He  _would_  like to put one around his shoulders without gagging. Or he can ask for one of the bones from his… Meal pile. That can scrape the shit off, right?

At that thought, he sits back against the cave wall (he’s bunched one of the skins against it to cover any of the harsh bumps), shaking his head. This is insane. He should be thinking of a way out of here, a way to save himself and Josh, not… Fuck. Not being a goddamn housewife in his fucked up cave home.

He needs to make Josh get him material to splint his leg. So he can get the fuck out of here.

Which. Now that Josh is gone and won’t want to mother hen him, he leans down to check on the leg and its break, hissing whenever his fingers brush a little too hard and agitate it. Surprisingly, the wounds themselves seem to be… Healing already? Well, faster than normal. He expected them to take a couple weeks to heal, at least, but already the puffiness has gone down and the cuts are closing enough to scab over. It hurts to brush his fingers over, still too new to truly be set in yet, but. Still.

Maybe that ‘healing wendigo spit’ is a real thing.

It would make sense to be able to heal their prey, especially if they like to keep it for as long as possible. Those thoughts send him into a shivering mess, thinking about a wendigo keeping a human prisoner alive for weeks… Months. Just feeding off them a little here and there and healing the wounds. Would the wendigo feed the prey? Stock it like fat livestock in order to truly keep them alive that long?

Would Josh eventually lose himself enough to do the same to Chris?

His shaking fingers keep brushing in all the wrong areas, causing him to hurt his leg to the point of wincing, so he sighs and leans back, tries to stop shaking and stop  _thinking._

Chris is saved from any more nasty thoughts by the sound of scrabbling and Josh’s distinct shriek. It sounds almost… Hurried, frazzled, and by the time Josh’s body peeks around the rock face, Chris has about three seconds to conceptualize Josh’s jittery, predator-like movements before the half-wendigo is in his lap, furiously rubbing his horns against his jacket.

His cheek is slowly oozing blood, a long gash cut from nose to ear.

“What the hell? You- What the fuck?” He’s too shocked to have any words, and Josh’s whimpering cuts off any more of the expletives that want to run off his mouth. Chris lets Josh huddle for a while, too shocked to really do anything else, but after a while, he slowly cups Josh’s chin and pulls him up and back so that Chris can _look_  at him.

His cloudy eyes are darting back and forth like they can’t find a place to land, and he’s breathing rapidly. His teeth occasionally gnash like he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Josh, he- He doesn’t look stable. Well. That’s not a great way to explain it, considering he’s a fucking half-monster right now, but he doesn’t even looks  _semi_ lucid.

“Josh? Hey, bud, what’s going on? Can you- Can you hear me?” Chris keeps his voice pointedly light, trying to keep out the fear or the concern. He’s pretty sure Josh can smell emotions.

Josh’s face jerks to focus on him, his pupils calming just a little as they latch onto the movements of Chris’ lips. Chris isn’t sure if Josh can see shapes, or colors or what or if it’s just sensing the movement, but the mix between being able to focus on his lips and hearing his voice seems to settle him fractionally. He lets out another of those pitiful whines, and  _god,_  it should not be this easy to look at a cannibalistic monster and feel sympathy and concern. But he’s Josh, first and foremost. No matter how fucked up he’s gotten himself this time around.

Chris is careful not to actually touch the bleeding cut, but he thumbs near it, swiping up some of the excess fluid and wiping it against one of the fur pelts. “What the hell happened to get you to run back that fast? Should we be- Should I be worried?” It didn’t occur to him until now that another, stronger wendigo might have spooked Josh and given him that cut. Didn’t occur to him until now that said monster could be on its way.

“...Hannah…” Josh mumbles, and pushes his face back into Chris’ chest. The name is garbled and broken, the syllables breaking into something almost unrecognizable, but the name sparks a different sort of anguish in Chris’ heart. The thought of prowling wendigos leaves his mind as he thinks of one specific, dead wendigo.

“She- She’s not gonna hurt us. She’s gone, Josh. I promise.” He saw her burn in the mansion, along with the rest of his friends. Not that Hannah was his friend at that point, so far gone that her only identifiable feature was the faded and stretched butterfly tattoo on her bicep.

It takes Chris another moment to realize the soft rhythmic movements coming from Josh are  _sobs._  Or at least, his strange approximation of them. His body jerks and it doesn’t seem like he’s actually producing any tears, but his breathing is jerky and hiccupy in between whines. Chris pulls him back to look him in the eyes before pulling him back in, actively wrapping his arms around the man.

He probably didn’t know she was dead. Chris was so far up the image of her grotesque and blood-stained face that he didn’t think that maybe Josh was mourning, remembering, for a second, his sister. “Shit. Shit, I’m sorry, man. What- What about Hannah?”

Her name warrants another howl of a whine, and then slowly, brokenly, “Fault....” Chris blinks at that and takes a moment to realize he’s saying everything that happened to her is  _his fault._

“What-? No that’s. No it’s not. C’mon, Josh, trust me when I say that it’s not your fault. Okay? It- It was just. It was a lotta bad circumstances and- Everything was fucked up and. These things happen. Sometimes. Clearly. I mean, she’s- She’s probably somewhere better than she was. ‘Least that- That spirit thing is _gone_  and she isn’t a hungry monster and-”

Chris shuts up when he feels Josh push his entire face up next to Chris’ neck, his breath shaky on his pulse. He hears another broken whine. Josh seems to be calming down, even if Chris isn’t, is more worked up than ever, his breath evening out and his jitters and shakes and strange movements calming down to a comfortable still. He seems content after about ten minutes, with Chris not _daring_ to say a peep.

Well, not until Josh suddenly croaks out,  _“Monster?”_

Chris has basically been operating on a stance of ‘just narrate my fucking life since no one else can understand me’, that he didn’t even stop to think that Josh might pick up on the comparison. Hannah was a wendigo. Josh is turning into one. Chris could say something funny, right now- “by the transitive property of equality, Josh is also a monster”- but none of this is funny.

The mixture of disfiguring fangs and cloudy eyes have a very peculiar way of making the emotions on a face very obscure. It’s hard to see or understand or know if the translated emotion is accurate. A grimace might just be a neutral expression impacted by a set of fangs. A blank look might actually be curiosity hindered by the lack of proper light filtering through the films of blindness.

The point is, Chris isn’t exactly sure what the expression on Josh’s face could be characterized as, but he’s positive it’s not a happy one. “Well. She- She tried to kill us. All of us.” He stutters out, knowing that’s really not an excuse to-

It’s just too complicated for an accurate explanation. Especially when Chris still isn’t sure how much of what he says actually can be understood by Josh.

Josh gnashes his teeth. Maybe it’s a tick he does when he’s trying to think. It makes Chris’ pulse jump a little, and then makes him worry as his teeth dig into spots of his gums. Josh doesn’t seem to mind, though, and maybe this is what’s supposed to happen- Dig into the gums to let the other fangs grow out.

“Monster.” He pulls back and seems to try to focus so hard, resulting in him looking vaguely cross-eyed and upset. He slowly pushes a clawed hand over his own heart, his movements slow and careful, as though he’s trying to look more human in this moment.

He’s asking if he’s a monster. Shit. If there is one thing that Josh Washington hates, it’s being labelled. Freak, crazy,  _monster._  Of course the remnants of his mind wouldn’t like to be labelled something so negative. And the wendigo aspects of his mind are probably offended that Chris would think so little of it.

Chris swallows and thinks, because Josh deserves a real answer here. He doesn’t deserve made-up lies and half truths. He wants- Needs- Josh to trust him. “...Hannah was a monster because she tried to kill all of us. She was fully. She was fully changed. There was nothing of her left. No love, no- Nothing. M-Mike said she got you. I d-don’t know why she would have spared you.”

He hopes that’s a good enough beginning and he’s sucking in a breath to continue when Josh huffs out, “Sister.”

Right. He thinks Hannah saved him because she knew him. And- Well, maybe that’s right. Maybe in the depth of her monstrous soul there was still a glimmer of the beautiful, kind girl that used to light up everyone’s world. Maybe she recognized Josh and couldn’t manage to kill him. By all intents and purposes, Mike should be dead, too. Maybe her ill-fated feelings for him saved Mike’s life.

He shivers a little. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe there was a tiny- Tiny sliver of her left. But. She was like the rest of the wendigos out there. Howling and shrieking and just looking for food. That’s it. Just a cruel, cannibalistic monster.” He leans forward and brushes a careful finger along the oozing cut on Josh’s cheek. Josh hisses and tries to flinch back, but Chris shushes him, and Josh stops. “Whoever did this? Is a monster. No compassion, no thought other than to guard its territory. An animal.”

Josh reached up to prod lightly at the cut, huffing at the soreness. He looks confused. 

“Now, you? Are you a monster? That’s what you’re asking me. That’s a loaded question, bro.” Chris says and he  _swears_ he hears an amused huff, but maybe he’s just projecting. Who fucking knows at this point. “You’ve. You’ve done some monstrous things. I mean. The reason you- The reason you’re  _turning_  into one of them is because you- Because of what you’ve eaten. But it’s not like you had a choice. It was eat or die. I- I would have done the same thing, y’know? The human body gets pushed too far, it does some crazy shit. We just got unlucky to be on a cursed mountain.”

He lets out a slow breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Josh is staring at him wide eyed, rapt. Grossly, his tongue darts out to catch some of the blood leaking down from his cheek and near his lips.

Chris ignores it and continues, “You- You haven’t even tried to hurt me. I mean, past that weird blood-sucking thing. But you’ve never done that again! The other wendigos…. They don’t know compassion. They know nothing except their hunger and their cruelty, and I- You’ve got the hunger and you’re becoming one of them, but it’s- You’re still. You’re not a monster, Josh. And I think we can stop you from becoming one.”

If he’s a ‘monster’, then he’s a monster who’s fed Chris, kept him warm and tried to heal his leg. Who nuzzles into his chest when he’s comfortable, or just because Chris is, evidenced by his barrel into the cavern earlier, safe. Despite everything, the kind and loyal friend that Chris knew is still there.

Josh gurgles out this weird trill, pushing his head against Chris’ chest again. It looks like his lips are upturned into a smile, any of the anxiety leaking out of his body gone. Most of it. Chris lets out another breath and reaches around to pat at Josh’s back.

“Yeah, yeah. Cuddle it up, man. See? Even more evidence that you’re not a monster. You just hit a snag in some weird, fucked up circumstances. It’ll work out.” Josh whines against him, and when he pulls back, his cheek is smeared in blood. Chris looks down at his jacket and groans at the mess he’s left there, tutting his tongue.

“Alright. Sudden conversation and mood change, I know, I know, but I need water, and you need your cheek cleaned up. Preferably with water, too. I dunno how you can manage it, but I- Go get us some water. Please?” It’s been over a day, and Chris’ tongue is so dry. Considering his body is pushing all its efforts into healing his leg, and considering he lost quite a lot of blood, he knows he’s gotta replace it.

“Or- You could carry me to a stream? I’m filthy. God, so are you, you need a bath.” Josh tilts his head at Chris for a long moment, before he jerks to his feet in a way that makes Chris almost flinch, the movements more reminiscent of a wendigo than a human. Then Josh is, for the millionth time in the past couple days, picking him up and pulling him close to his body, crooning out a quick purring noise when Chris doesn’t seem  _psyched_  about it.

But. He’s getting out of the cave. Even if he’s going to be brought back in here, considering his inability to move, at least he’ll get some sun- Well, no, moonlight, considering Josh’s sleeping habits-, water, and fresh air. The putrid smell of the cavern was starting to grate on his nerves, and the endless claustrophobia from being inside a cave wasn’t helping his anxiety much.

“Awesome. Fuck, awesome. Good boy, Josh.” Okay, so sometimes he seemed more like a confused dog than  _Josh_  to Chris. That’s not exactly his fault, considering the way Josh acts around him.

“Good boy, Chris.” Josh replies with a chitter, and Chris can’t help himself- He lolls his head in Josh’s arms and lets out his first genuine laugh in god knows how long.


	4. Midnight

The moon is nearly full, letting off enough light that Chris can at least  _see_  where they’re going. Kind of. He really wishes he hadn’t lost his glasses. It’s certainly made interpreting Josh’s movements and facial features tricky so far.

Josh lopes along a little clumsily with Chris in his arms, but it’s a lope nonetheless. He seems excited, his steps quick and his mouth upturned into an approximation of a smile. Chris misses the fern-curl of a smile Josh used to have, the way his lips would slowly inch upwards until his face was nothing  _but_  a smile, but he takes what he can get. Besides. As grotesque as Josh seems right now, even Chris can’t deny that he’s a _little_ adorable when he’s smiling. Better than when he’s snarling, at least.

“Hey, while we’re out here. We should- I really need to splint my leg, man. It’s gonna heal fucked up if I don’t.” He doesn’t want to break the easy silence they have going, but he’s gotta say something.

What Chris is  _expecting_  is maybe a… He doesn’t know. A whine? A purr? One of his weird little noises that shows Chris he’s being acknowledged, even if Josh doesn’t fully understand. What he’s  _not_ expecting is the long, wet stripe of a tongue down his face. Josh has been good with not licking him since he first… Took him? Saved him? So this is a shock.

He splutters, but doesn’t push Josh away, knowing he’ll be met with a stubborn growl. And Josh pulls away after a moment, giving a soft chirrup. “What the fuck. Do I taste good, or something?”

Wrong question, clearly, since Josh looks at him with vaguely hungry eyes and gives a jerk of his head. A nod. Which. Duh. “Okay, so here’s a suggestion. Don’t? Lick me? If that was meant to be… I don’t know. Affectionate? In wendigo speech? Trust me, it felt a lot more like you were just tasting me. While also leaving your disgusting spit all over my face. Gross, dude. Gross.”

Josh  has the  _audacity_  to look amused, so Chris decides to give him a little of his own medicine. After all, not much else can qualify for  _more_ crazy. He darts up in Josh’s grip and licks along a path of his cheek that isn’t covered in blood or teeth. Josh visibly flinches back, shocked, before he lets out this half-chirp half-howl that takes Chris a moment to realize is. Is-

He’s _laughing._

And then he’s darting in and pointedly licking another stripe up Chris’ face, going so far to lick his hair up straight. This is the closest that Chris has gotten to seeing Josh truly happy since he came to find him, so he just lets him, pouting and huffing at the treatment.  “You gonna groom me? Y’know, you think you’re so tough with your teeth, but really? You’re a giant cat. Seriously. One giant, murderous cat.”

Josh tilts his head at Chris’ words, saying “Chris.” before leaning in to nuzzle at Chris’ cheek, just furthering his point. God, what a failure for a scary monster. Chris is honestly glad he’s gotten to the point where the sight of Josh doesn’t terrify him (and wasn’t he just hoping for the opposite a day ago?), where he’s almost completely confident those claws and teeth won’t skewer him and make him a wendigo’s shish kabob.

He gets lost thinking about how comfortable he’s gotten with Josh that he hardly registers that Josh is setting him down on a grassy slope, the ground wet from dew. It’s soft- the grass is growing back in thick clumps due to the stream a little ways down, and it feel so fucking  _good_ to sit his ass down on something that isn’t coarse deer fur, and isn’t the cave floor.

He watches as Josh moves away from him and slides into the water of the stream without even flinching from the cold. It’s the middle of March, slowly warming up, sure, but the water is still carrying the snowy ice from the top of the mountain down. It’s gotta be hardly over the temperature needed to freeze. But Josh looks content, wading to the middle of the stream and pushing himself all the way under.

Chris is plucking the grass from the hill when he realizes the seconds have slid into minutes, and Josh’s head has yet to poke back up above the water. He doesn’t know how long wendigos can hold their breaths, but _Josh isn’t a wendigo yet,_  not fully, and multiple minutes of no oxygen can’t be good for him. Not at all. His heart rate picks up, horrible thoughts of Josh drowning, of Josh drowning on  _purpose_  entering his mind and pushing him into a panic.

He pants heavily, his already-blurry eyesight fogging up even more. It’s hard to scrabble further down the bank with leg, but he tries anyways.

Josh might have been in a good enough mood on the way down here, enough so that Chris assumed he’d put the topic of  _monsters_  and  _cannibalism_  and  _humanity_  to the back of his mind. He’s noticed, after all, that Josh’s attention span is even worse than normal, hinged on the quick moving stimulus of a predator.

But maybe not. Maybe he thought about it some more, and Chris’ words weren’t enough to dispel the thoughts of monstrosity in his confused head. Maybe he decided to free Chris from the caverns and then leave him to himself on the banks of a stream, where he’ll have water and a chance to survive, while he, the presumed monster, dies.

It’s not like Josh hasn’t tried to kill himself before, and maybe that’s what’s getting Chris so worked up. That he might have, for the second time, been useless to help Josh.

Chris just reaches the bank when Josh’s head pushes back out of the water. He doesn’t flail, doesn’t gasp for breath, and he’s got a fish in his mouth. He’s so shocked that he just collapses on the muddy bank, staring at his friend.

Josh makes a confused noise at Chris’ migration to the bank, clambering out of the stream with all the jittery movements of the predator he’s evidently adopted his breathing time from. He’s fine. He wasn’t offing himself, he wasn’t drowning. He’s fine. He was just  _hunting_ , and now that he’s here, dropping the fish on the grass and shaking water from his body like a wet dog, Chris feels ridiculous.

His heart's still beating madly, and he sits back to even out his breathing. Josh picks up that something went wrong after a moment, because he moves to Chris’ side to push the toothy side of his face against Chris’ chest, listening and whining at the  _fear_  and  _anxiety_ that’s likely etched and oozing off of Chris’ features.

“I’m f-fine, just- Fuck, Josh, you didn’t tell me you can hold your b-breath for five fucking minutes! That’s not- I didn’t know!” His voice is weak and shaky- everything feels far away and loose now, and he realizes that he normally wouldn’t have reacted so viscerally. He’s pretty sure he’s close to breaking down. He’s pretty sure he needs to be on fucking  _meds._

Josh tilts his head at him, then scrambles backwards to pick the fish back up in his mouth and drop it on Chris’ lap. It’s wet and cold and slimy, but it effectively distracts Chris from darker thoughts. “Gross, dude. You know I hate sushi. Could’ve at least gotten some sticky rice while you were at it.”

Josh blinks at him and prods at the fish, silently beckoning Chris to  _eat._  His chest is all puffed out again, his half-blind eyes darting from Chris’ face to the fish, over and over again. Oh. _Oh._  He wants Chris to praise him again.

He eyes the scales of the fish, wishing once again that he had the foresight to bring more than just his drunken ass to a mountain. He’d had a lighter, really, but he’d been using it when he fell. Chris pushes the fish in Josh’s face, and Josh looks so offended for a moment, before he says, “Cut it up? I don’t want to chew through  _scales._ You might be into the extra fiber, but I? Am a sensible young man. I don’t need to get my mouth all cut up.”

Josh chirps at that, offense giving way to amusement. He makes quick work of the fish with his claws, glancing up at Chris every now and then as though to gauge how big his mouth is. It’s a big enough fish- It’ll feed Chris comfortably, and considering the rough filets that Josh manages to cut from the fish, laid carefully in the discarded scales to prevent them from getting dirty, it won’t actually be half bad.

Fish is almost  _meant_  to be raw, and at least the flavor and texture is familiar when he starts to bite into the flesh. Yeah, he really never was a fan of sushi, but Josh was, and always dragged him to whatever ‘hot’ sushi bar was the big thing in town that month. The reminder of how _normal_ Josh used to be sours the meal a little, but… Not by much. It’s still good, and it fills Chris’ stomach. It still doesn’t like how much raw meat is being consumed, clenching uncomfortably, but it’s better than starving. And Josh didn’t have to do this. He could have brought something else.

“Thanks, bro. This is actually…? Not a half-bad meal, considering. Maybe next time you hunt, you can get some vegetables? There’s gotta be  _something_  growing at this time of the year. Nuts, maybe. I dunno.” He finishes two of the filets before gesturing for Josh to eat, and the half-wendigo makes quick work of the rest. He’s disgusting when he eats, all jerky movements and loud, animalistic noises that make Chris’ brain want to freeze up in fear, but at least the fish is  _mostly_  clean, and won’t dirty up his clean face.

Now that he’s taken a dive in the water, it’s washed off a lot of the disgusting gore and old blood from his face and body. It helps to make him look a little more human. Less like the crazed, demonic monster, and more like the boy Chris knows. His cheek looks better, washed out, and the gouge where his teeth have been emerging looks far less deranged now that the dried blood is gone. He could still never pass as a normal human, but it helps Chris’ more instinctual mind push down the fear at his more predatory features.

When Josh finishes his meal, Chris fidgets and starts pulling himself closer to the water. He pulls his legs into the water. It’s cold as fuck, and he’s sure he’ll get like. Hypothermia or something if he doesn’t hurry, but he’s hoping to numb up his broken leg, stiffen the muscles for a little bit. Which might not be the healthiest thing, but he’d rather not have to feel it. He cups some of the water to drink, first, not realizing how dehydrated he really is until he realizes he’s been cupping and drinking for at least ten minutes, making starved noises with each feeling of water down his dry and scratchy throat. Caves and mines aren’t the greatest for his lungs and throat, and he hadn’t even realized, in the mess that has been the past few days, how fucking neglected his body has been.

Washing his face is next, and he’s horrified at how dirty and bloody the water in his hands turns as he scrubs at his face. The ice-cold water is like a breath of fresh air to him, jerking his body and mind into movement and working. Chris really hadn’t realized how little he was taking anything in since Josh took him. Despite his outward comfort with the wendigo, clearly the events of the past couple days have hit him hard enough for his brain to effectively shut down any emotional responses.

Sure, he’s had a couple mild breakdowns, but they’ve been pushed away, each time. Now? Sitting on the bank of a grassy stream, water streaming from his face and his stomach semi-full, there’s nothing else for him to think about. Maybe he should be happy and relieved at this  _gift_  that Josh has given him but-

No. Fresh air and water isn’t a gift, it’s a necessity.

Chris realizes as he’s wiping away the last of the dirt from his face that not all the water is from the stream. He’s crying, leaking in hot fat tears. At least they won’t leave trails down his face, since he’s already wet. He shivers, and it isn’t just the cold.

He’s kidding himself if these tears are just from the last few days. He’s been a time bomb waiting to go off since the Incident, since he left the mountain as the sole survivor. Since he had no one to talk to,  _really_  talk to about what happened. Since he lost his best friends. Since he was accused, at least once a day, of killing all of his friends himself.

A sob breaks from his throat before he can pull it back, and once that comes, there’s no stopping the rest. It’s like the floodgates have been opened, and before he knows it, he’s crying and sobbing and whining, tears and snot mixing and running down his face. There is nothing in the world, for the moment, but his misery, his loneliness, his fucked up realization that even if he does survive, he’s going to probably end up food eventually, or like Josh.

It feels good to cry, to think of all his friends, to  _mourn_  them. He’s been in a numb state of pretending. He shifts and pulls himself out of the water, his legs unfeeling. He’s been like his legs for a month, pretending nothing was wrong and everything will be okay.

Pretend, pretend, pretend.

He can’t pretend, anymore. There’s something about the bright moon above him and the fresh air mixing and chilling his wet skin that prevents him from pretending, from putting up any of those mental walls. All he is, right now, is a crying boy on a grassy slope. Nothing more, nothing less.

He’s surprised Josh doesn’t try and come comfort him. Maybe he realizes, somewhere deep in his human mind, that Chris needs to be alone right now. Or at least… Wallow. For just a moment. Chris lets out a shuddering breath and looks up at the sky, at the trees that are just now starting to push small buds that will turn to flowers and leaves.

Jokes have always been his way of coping, of travelling through life. Throw something in that will distract the person from the pain, give them a little happiness in their life. He does the same for himself, usually, passing everything by with a well-timed quip, a dorky pun, or- Something. He can’t anymore. It’s like his brain has run out of jokes and anything relating to  _distraction_. All he can do is face the reality.

And the reality is that he’s covered in snot and tears, and he’s lost everything he held dear in the world. Well. He wipes at his eyes so his blurry vision won’t be even worse, flitting a glance over to Josh. The half-wendigo has scaled one of the weeping willows near the bank and is crouched in one of the lower branches, staring down at Chris. His cloudy eyes catch the moonlight occasionally, almost glowing. Chris is pretty sure he can hear him faintly whining and rocking back and forth on his perch.

He hasn’t lost everything.

He thought he did, thought that even Josh was gone, but… He’s not. He’s still there somewhere. A little more crazy than usual but- At least there’s that. At least Josh will understand what he’s gone through, what he’s done. Who he is and why he can’t just push everything down anymore.

Josh gives him something to do, too. Without it, Chris would have nothing to do but to dwell on his nightmares and losses, how much he doesn’t fit in the world anymore. With Josh, he has a goal, something to fix. An end-game wherein he has his friend back, human.

“J-Josh. C’mere. Please?” He asks, shaky and jittery.

He has about two seconds to process Josh leaping from the tree to land on the grass, his strangely splayed hands and feet nearly causing him to fall over. Not nearly wendigo enough for a perfect landing. He scrabbles over on all fours, pushing his head into Chris’ side and nuzzling immediately. He’s purring, intermediately replacing the purr with a whine that Chris is pretty sure means  _Are you okay?_

Chris reaches out and slowly threads fingers through Josh’s hair, making sure to give some attention to the nubs of antlers. They’re bigger, already, the velvet surrounding them thicker, too. He wonders how long it’ll take for them to grow, and how big they’ll get. He gives a smile as Josh leans into the touches, purring and whining going quiet in favor of happy moans.

“Still got you, buddy. Fuck, it’s messed up, but I still got you. And you got me.” Chris murmurs, using his empty hand to wipe away the rest of the tears on his face. He gives up after a moment when Josh sits up and starts licking at his cheeks, lapping up every tear. Fucking weird, but. Maybe this time around, it’s not his way of tasting Chris, but to comfort him. And at least his breath is  _slightly_  less fetid than before. Fishy, now, unfortunately, but Chris’ll make sure to clean the both of them up before they go back to the cave.

“I’m glad I found you.” He says after a while, and Josh chirps in reply, his eyes managing to focus in on Chris for once as he darts him his approximation of a smile. “We’ll figure this out and- And we’ll build ourselves up, again.”

Josh licks him one last time, chittering a soft “Chris.” Maybe it’s his way of saying that they’ll be okay, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween, y'all. Hope you enjoy this chapter. It was a lot of fun to write, and gave me a lot of ideas for what to do next, so stay tuned. Y'all make me blush with the love you send me... I wish I had more words to say than 'omg thank you.' Rest assured, your comments give me the energy and love to keep writing these things. That said, please comment! Lemme know what you think! 
> 
> And if you wanna see me on [Tumblr](buckycurtis.tumblr.com), feel free! I'm always over there, and I try to answer asks with due diligence.


	5. Aurora

Chris is awoken from his sleeping by words. Spoken, human words. Not Josh’s voice, either. Some person is saying, “We have a visual on a survivor. One survivor, repeat.” He’s awake immediately, sitting the fuck up and trying to focus on the dark surroundings. Someone is here. Someone is going to help them, get them home. There’s- They sent a team? Again?

It doesn’t make sense, but he’s loathe to look a gift horse in the mouth. “F-fuck, fuck, yeah! We’re here!” He says, and the masculine voice that was talking  _(is that? F-)_  cuts off abruptly. Maybe he heard Chris. Fuck, he wishes he could move, could stand and meet whoever is down here.

The voice doesn’t verify where they are, doesn’t say anything else at all. Instead, Chris is met with a chitter, and then Josh is scrambling over to him, sitting with his knees drawn up in front of Chris. His head is tilted, like he’s confused at Chris’ words. Chris doesn’t understand why Josh isn’t freaking the fuck out- He should be a growling, shrieking mess. Hell, he should be taking the voice as _prey._

Maybe he’s getting better, and Chris feels his heart looping upwards. They’re saved and Josh is getting better and-

“Stay back! No! No!” It’s the same voice, but… It’s coming out of Josh’s mouth. The feeling of hope turns to despair and disgust, fear and uneasiness. The Stranger said the wendigos could mimic their prey perfectly.  Hell, he heard one call out Jess’ voice.

It doesn’t seem like Josh knows what he’s saying. Not really. He’s mimicking the words perfectly, in a voice not his own, but it’s just that- repetitions. Like a deranged parrot. Even the small hope that Josh is going to be able to speak is ruined, because to Josh, these aren’t words. They’re just noises to lure his prey in enough to capture. 

Josh is looking at him oddly, like he doesn’t understand why Chris responded to the words. He opens his mouth to speak more, and Chris clamps a hand over his decimated lips, feeling the hard press of teeth against his palms. “Please. Don’t. Josh, that’s- That’s people _screaming_ for help. I don’t wanna hear that.”

He knew a group went down to the mines to look for any survivors. He knew they all disappeared and it filled the community with a distinct unease. Maybe Josh got to them. Considering how many there were, he couldn’t have gotten all of them. He would- Surely he’d be a full wendigo by now, right? The other wendigos in the caverns must have eaten the majority of the people.

“Please don’t Josh.” Is mimicked back to him in Chris’ own voice. It’s so fucking  _eerie_ , he can’t help but shiver, which just makes Josh tilt his head all the more. “Chris?”

There’s a strange light in his eyes. He doesn’t always look altogether there, in fact he never does, but it’s even less than usual. The hunger looks amplified, the twitchy wendigo-esque movements more prevalent in his mannerisms. It’s like he’s not even trying to hide it, even though Chris is aware he normally does.

“Don’t  _do_  that. Do you even know what you’re saying? Or is it just- Are you just, repeating shit. So your prey follows you. Jesus. Fuck. That’s fucked up.” He runs a slightly-shaking hand down his leg, fidgeting with the splint he practically had to force Josh to help him make. It’s a little lopsided, and his leg is probably still going to heal all fucked up, but- It does the job. Besides. It’s started to hurt less and less. Hopefully that saliva thing helps. Maybe he should have Josh slobber all over his leg. Which is fucking weird.

He wouldn’t ask that of him right now. Not when Josh’s jaw is hanging open slightly, his eyes unfocused and barely hanging onto what Chris is saying. He looks more like he’s looking  _through_  Chris than anything.

“Have- Have you eaten?” Chris asks slowly. He knows Josh has been eating regular meals with him, from the animals he hunts, but… Maybe that doesn’t do shit. Maybe the hunger only subsides from the meals that are causing his transformation.  He swallows uneasily, entirely not on board with allowing Josh to find the flesh he really wants.

Josh follows the jump in Chris’ pulse, and before Chris knows it, Josh is on his lap and lapping and gnawing on his neck. It’s the same as the first night- Not enough to fuck with Chris, to leave a substantial wound (and already, the bite marks from a couple days ago are gone, healed up without a scar), but enough that Josh can lap up his blood like a deranged vampire.

Chris lets out this low, scared whine, and that seems to spurn Josh on even more, his hands moving to grip Chris’ side harshly, the claws digging into his back enough for him to feel the points threatening to pop his flesh like a ripe tomato. His teeth sink a little deeper, edging out of the ‘weird kinky vampire roleplay’ vibe and into ‘holy shit he might eat me’ territory.

“Josh- fuck. F-fuck, you’re  _hurting_  me.” Chris whines. Fear is blossoming in his stomach- He’d gone days understanding that Josh is getting better, he’s not going to hurt Chris. That Josh remembers him and somehow can stop the violent, hungry urges that plague the rest of the wendigos.

He’s an idiot for not staying vigilant. For thinking that Josh is well enough to hold himself back. To ever think that his presence alone could help Josh. He whines again, trying to arch away from the contact. He gets a growl in response, and claws digging into his back. There’s no way he’s not bleeding at this point.

There’s nothing to do except sit here and hope that Josh doesn’t hurt him too much. Any movements or struggles on his part are met with more violence, so. He tries to sit still, to let Josh do as he pleases. He winces occasionally, the brush is his sharp teeth hurting like a bitch.

Throughout the whole ordeal, he mumbles for Josh to please stop, please let him go, eat something else,  _please_ , but it’s not until Josh feels full, or is just content, or whatever arbitrary reason he sees fit, that he pulls back, licking up the mess in Chris’ neck and scooting away from Chris’ lap. The second that Josh is away, Chris scoots as far away from him as he can, pulling one of the fur rugs over his shoulders and body to try to hide. He glances up at Josh for a few seconds a time, his eyes darting wildly to and from his gaze.

Josh just stares at him, sniffing the air as though relishing in Chris’ fear. For all Chris knows, that’s exactly what he’s doing. After a moment, Josh makes this low growl, and then he’s gone, leaping out of the cavern to go prowl the mines. Hopefully for the entire night.

His movements are jittery, and he even skitters up the wall on his way out, like he’s doing it just because he can. 

Chris shivers the second he’s gone, his inane mumbling rising in tone. Nothing of important. Just babbles, really. The most prevalent repetition is a soft realization- “Josh is turning into a monster. A fucking  _monster._  Monsters don’t- Monsters aren’t people. He’s not a fucking person.”

Josh is a predator, and as much as he might remember Chris now, he’s easily willing to hurt and feed off of him, if he can’t find anything else.

He shakes and tries to stem the bleeding of his neck. There isn’t a lot- Maybe that spit works as a coagulate, too, thickening his blood enough that the wendigo’s prey doesn’t bleed out before it can get a proper meal. He’s pretty sure Josh’s spit wasn’t doing that a couple days ago, when he bit him last. His neck had bled much more then, and the wound was shallower.

It’s just more proof that Josh is further turning. The velvety horns have been getting longer, and when Josh tore his shirt off yesterday, annoyed by the wetness of the fabric after the stream, Chris could see the way his body was shrinking and becoming emaciated in the ways that the wendigos are shaped. Streamlined for movement, constantly hungry.

The hope he had the day before is gone, rushed away in the same breath he takes as he sobs in fear and hopelessness. He’s sick of this fading in and out of hope and no hope. He has to do something. He has to- He can’t just sit here, watching Josh get worse and worse.

Half of him wants to just succumb to his fate as Josh’s meal. But he can’t do that to Josh. Can’t condemn him to a life of mindless hunger and pain in the guise of a cruel animal. The Stranger said this is a curse of the mountain. Maybe there’s hope for Josh if they get off of it, leave the fucking area behind forever.

Chris doesn’t dare hope. He just- He’s going to do. He will lead Josh down the mountain, convince him to go. No matter what. He tries to dry his eyes to preserve his tears, wiping wet fists across his face. It’s hard to ignore the pain of the scratches in his back, but it keeps him present, which is all that he needs.

He hears a distant shriek, and can’t tell if it’s Josh or one of the other wendigos. He should learn it, categorize all of the different ways that Josh is still human. And all the ways he isn’t. They can’t fully leave the mountain until Chris can at least walk, but maybe he can start convincing him. Hopefully.

Chris sucks in a breath and tries not to breath in the smell of his own blood.


	6. Interlude I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Josh's POV is extremely hard. By all intent's and purposes, this chapter would be a rambling drug-fueled mess. (I used to write like that my dear readers, and we should all be glad that I got over it.) But I had to make it semi-coherent. That means dropping a lot of the run-ons and insane pleadings and things that don't make sense. I hope it's still obvious how disjointed Josh's mind is right now.
> 
> I'll be using his POV chapters as interludes. This means they'll be a little smaller than the other chapters, as they're just setting up and reminding the reader where Josh is, in the story. We get everything from what Chris sees, and sometimes what he sees can amount to "I don't fucking know." So it's good to check in with our Josh's progress every now and again. 
> 
> Enjoy!

A shriek reverberates off the walls. It’s his own voice, shooting back to him, but areas of his brain still go on high alert for a moment, thinking it’s one of the others. He growls low at himself, trying to sort out his thoughts. It’s so hard to think consciously, to think the way that Chris wants him to. The beast is taking over, more and more hunger and desperation clawing it’s way through his consciousness

He’d run through the mines for a while, looking for any food that the others might have left lying around. He wants fresh meat, blood running down his chin and the stiff-soft pull and tug of muscle matter. Warmth seeping from the cooling body and entering him, leaving him awash in energy. Pushing forward the transformation, so he can finally be a respected one of his kind, instead of the half-turned  _child._  He doesn’t realize he’s swaying, eyes closed in the idea of a fresh meal that he has hunted and taken down himself, until the top of his head brushes against a rock outcropping.

The growing antlers itch at the touch, and he pauses in his fantasies to rub up against the stone, whining at the pain and relief. 

He needs-

Right. He needs food. He hurt Chris and there’s a hissing voice in his ear telling him he’s going to  _kill him_ , hurt him  _‘till he’s dead and gone, you silly boy_. He pulls away from the rock before he feels the urge to slam his forehead into it. The voices have been more and more infrequent, but that just makes them all the more surprising when they come.

He knows one of the voices is Hannah. His sister. Chris said so. He can’t understand everything that Chris says, the words sometimes blending together into non-threatening sounds, nothing more, but he gets the gist of it. Josh can only hope he doesn’t lose the ability. Not that it’s easy to consciously hope, either.

His mind is nothing but a floating, swirling mass of predatory desire and the remnants of the fucked up human being he used to be. There’s days where it’s easier to just operate on the instincts, to ignore the human within that’s screaming within. The human Josh was isn’t- He was just some  _foolish boy,_  crazy and stupid and dangerous. One of the voices tells him this is his penance. It’s the voice that whispers he should leave Chris, leave before he messes him up, too. This is  _Josh’s_ hell, not Chris’.

Josh drags a clawed hand down his face, ignoring the pain when he scratches deep enough to draw blood. He should stay away from Chris. But if he does, one of the others will eat him, will claim him as their own. And they’re so much crueller than he even knows how to be, minds warped beyond even his recognition. He shivers and sucks on his bloody fingers.

His belly is content, now. The blood from Chris wasn’t enough, is never enough, but it wrapped his mind in a happy little high for a few minutes, and he can feel the energy of the curse pushing through him again. It stopped after he found Chris, for a day or two. But now it’s back, and he should hate it, should move back towards humanity, but the warmth, the chilling damnation of it all is so good, so intoxicating, and he’s so  _hungry._ It’s hard not to fold into the warm embrace of a curse designed to make him into a monster.

The other wendigos have already shed their velvet. He can smell the blood in the mines, even if they’ve eaten the waste. It gives off such a peculiar smell. Josh is certain if the wendigos weren’t just a monstrous, hungry being, if they were a real biological species, the scents would draw them together to interact more closely.

As it is, he hasn’t wanted to leave his cavern since yesterday. He whines as he feels his skin knitting itself back up. So soon after a meal, the curse works to keep him alive, to spurn on the transformation. It’s pain. Hell. His head splits into two and his gums feel as though they’ll crack right off his jaw. The transformation is always supposed to be quick- Days. Hours. A quick eternal damnation for his transgressions against mankind.

He whines between his teeth, curling up against the edge of the cave and rubbing his growing antlers furiously as they itch and grow into a warp speed that he knows, even in his hysteria, knows is impossible. The voices scream at him that he’s a failure, hopeless, just a disgusting monster who will soon  _look like what his soul does._ Hannah blames him for her death, an insidious hissing voice that leaves him scrabbling for thoughts.

Josh wasn’t expecting this. Wasn’t expecting so much pain from his meal. He feels worn-out and crazy, and that human spark of his is thinking of hiding for a while, leaving him to be the dumb animal. For a while, at least. He can feel something warm dripping down his face, and he urges himself not to hurt Chris again, to protect him, be good to him,  _be nice to him,_ before he feels himself slipping away and the instincts and urges taking their place.

It’s not that the monster and Josh are separate beings. On the contrary, they’re one and the same, meshing and changing and working towards reaching equilibrium. But the human parts of his brain are so worn out, and sometimes the instincts work to the conscious, pushing down anything else.

Josh licks his lips, chittering to himself at the taste of Chris’ blood still leaving heavenly little after tastes in his mouth. He wonders how often he can feed from his human without hurting him. He’s pretty sure he already hurt him, today, but it doesn’t matter much. Chris is  _prey,_  is his, is to be used how he sees fit ( _no he’s not no he’s not)_. He groans at the warring thoughts. He wants to be a higher being, something smart and talkative and Josh, and he wants to be a basic creature, doing nothing but eat and survive and thrive on this barren fucking mountain.

He growls at himself and after a wild shake of his head, a few spray droplets of blood from the scratches in his cheek flying around, he pushes away the human voices, his own included.

Chris is to be protected. He messed up, treating him as normal prey. He needs food, real food, but he can’t hurt Chris. He needs to go cuddle with him and make it clear that Josh is sorry. Maybe he’ll talk to him again. He tried to repeat words he’d heard earlier, but it didn’t go over well- Maybe if he uses the voice of his sister, Chris will be in a better mood.

And then Chris will smile at him with his flat teeth, and scratch at his sore antlers, and everything will be fine. It’ll be fine, and he’s not defective because he hasn’t eaten the human yet. He’s fine. It’s all fine, he’ll be good.

He digs his claws into the rock for a moment before he moves to go back to the cavern and apologize.


	7. Dawn

There is a permanent aura of smoke in the garage. Chris waves a hand in front of him as he stumbles over to one of the raggedy couches, giving a low, slow whistle. He takes a sip off his vodka mixer, glancing over at Josh.

There’s always  _some_  people who could smoke a goddamn bowl and still look sober as all hell. And then there’s Josh, who looks stoned even when he’s dead sober. Right now? He looks like he’s melting into the couch, eyes heavily lidded and practically exuding a presence of  _calm_. It’s not a bad look for him, in all honesty. The wild looks and dark, heavy thoughts that Chris knows constantly circulates that boy must take a toll on him. A little grass has  _got_  to help.

Josh leans up and forward from the couch, leaning into Chris’ space to steal his drink and take a long, slow drink, almost spilling in the process. His movements are slow, like he’s operating through a pleasant fog. Which, he technically is.

“Shit, guys, you tryin’ to hotbox anyone who comes into the garage? I, for one, care about the safety of my poor, hard-working lungs.” Chris grins when Josh giggles and leans back against the cushion of the couch to get comfortable again.

He sees Mike roll his eyes, before he passes a tightly-rolled joint to him. “Maybe we are. Josh here smoked a good half of this thing. Take a little down before he steals it again.” He huffs, ignoring the way Josh just grins over at him innocently.

Sure, half their parties end up with wild gatherings and a much more loud and crowded kind of scene, but then there’s nights like this, where a few of them escape the noise and music to come out and fucking _relax_. Chris almost looks forward to their garage nights more than anything else.

Beth is sitting in Sam’s lap on one of the spinning chairs, the two of them looking  _mostly_ sober. Maybe a little buzzed. Beth’s hands are on Sam’s hip, and wow that’s new. Sam’s pressed up against her, giving her careful looks every now and again. Chris hopes it goes somewhere. At least someone in their little group deserves a little romantic happiness (Mike and Em don’t count, strictly on the grounds that they’re  _annoying_  together).

Everyone looks happy enough, and Chris has this odd moment after taking down a drag where he just. Tries to commit this image to memory. He doesn’t know why, but it seems important to look around the room and realize he’s among friends, that every one of them has the capacity to be content, to be a family.

Josh is leaning against the couch comfortably, until he decides that Chris’ lap is a much better spot. It jerks Chris out of his thinking, and he looks down to see Josh grinning up at him from the middle of his lap. Only in this state could he be so comfortable with himself that he’d do something like this and not crow out a ‘no homo.’

“Comfy there, bro?” He asks, and Josh laughs and mumbles that Chris is warm, don’t make it weird. Another pass of the joint, and Chris’ hands are in Josh’s hair, massaging him like he’s some lap cat, instead of his stupid best friend. Emily comes out eventually, and they all have to deal with her and Mike arguing over everything and nothing whatsoever. Chris still doesn’t understand how those two egos ever clashed into something romantic, but if it works for them? That’s fine. Well, it would be, if they didn’t argue so fucking much.

Emily and Mike end up making out, which is better than their arguing, and after a good bit of conversation about a movie- _evidently,_  Josh has a _lot_  to say about the _Matrix_  movies- Sam and Beth go at it. There’s a good bit a good-natured cheering, even Mike and Em pulling apart long enough to join into the boy’s cajoling calls. They get a laugh from Beth and a middle finger from Sam, before they get back to it, Emily and Mike following soon after.

“Well. Jus’ me and you, Joshua. Would you like a little experimentation?” Chris asks in a ridiculously dorky voice, and he’s met with a laugh. He doesn’t realize that Josh is avoiding eye contact.

He’s saved from more awkward conversation when Hannah comes out, her eyes glancing from Mike and Emily (a frown and discomfort flashing over her face for but a moment), to Sam and Beth. She stares at them for a second, before she comes to sit down on the couch next to Josh, laying her head on one of his propped legs. “You owe me twenty bucks.”

Josh pushes his head up to stare at her. His thoughts are so slow and molasses-like that Chris can almost _hear_  him thinking. “Wha’s that, Han?”

Hannah gestures to Sam and Beth a little awkwardly, giving a small smile, just this small curl of her lips. “You owe me twenty dollars. They kissed before school was let out.”

Josh snorts and drops his head back to Chris’ lap, giving a small chuckle. “Fuck, you’re right. Goddamn, Sam’n’Beth. Couldn’t stay sexually repressed for a couple more months? Christ.” He fumbles to grab his wallet from his jeans, taking way too long to hand Hannah a twenty.

“You _bet_ on your sister hooking up with Sam?” Chris asks, rolling his eyes. “Damn, you Washington's are savages.” He whistles slowly. “I would get punched in the face if I ever tried that with my sister.”

Hannah lets out a sudden laugh, and Chris doesn’t understand why Sam and Beth pull away long enough to let out a peal of laughter too. Sam’s voice rushes out, “Don’t tell them!”

“I’m not!” Hannah exclaims, covering her mouth with her hand.

“What?” Josh and Chris slur out at the exact same time, sharing a confused look.

Beth gives the two of them a pointed look that makes no sense, which causes Hannah and Sam to fall into laughter again. “Don’t worry about it, _bros.”_

The hand in Josh’s hair has stilled since the conversation started, but when Josh moves to sit up and likely start a _thing_ , Chris fists his fingers to keep him on his lap. Keep him content and the mood light. That just makes the girls laugh again, before Hannah purposefully tries to change the subject. Despite Chris’ many attempts to get some clarity, even Mike eventually tells him to let the girls keep their secrets, and neither of them can quite remember the conversation later, anyways.

\--

There’s a slow drip of water from one of the corners of the cavern. Maybe it’s raining back up on the surface. He hopes not- He’s gotta convince Josh to take him to the surface every day, get water at least _once_  a day.

He’s focusing on not thinking, at all. Not thinking about Josh, not remember Josh as he should be, not thinking or mourning or grieving. Nothing at all and then-

Chris is well aware that screaming like an infant child would look bad. But he doesn’t care. When Josh comes skittering back into the cavern, moving on all fours with blood running down his face and his near-sightless eyes looking through Chris again, he can’t help but shriek and scramble backwards. Why, he wants to ask, does human evolution mean running from a predator includes  _screaming?_  That seems besides the point of running and hiding.

He scrambles until his back scrapes roughly against the rock face, the fresh cuts jarring out a siren call in his nerves and leaving him overwhelmed with pain for a split second. He’d taken his jackets and sweaters off once Josh had left, in an attempt to see how deep they ran. The Answer? Not much, but still enough that one of his sweaters is soaked in his blood now.

Josh sniffs the air wildly, like he’s not even trying to act human anymore. He jitters around Chris before finding the bloodied sweater, lifting it to his nose and sniffing before gently placing it in the center of their nest. Then he goes and pulls on Chris’ sides, clearly wanting a look at his back.

Normally, Chris would go. But right now? Fuck Josh. He doesn’t even want the man touching him. Not right now. He’s gonna have to convince him to leave the mountain with him eventually, but for now? He doesn’t deserve to look at the wounds he inflicted upon Chris.

He’s met with a soft whine, and Chris takes a moment to really look at him. He proceeds to flinch backwards again, because Josh, in the past hour, has  _changed_. His antlers are longer, bigger, the velvet stark against his hair. He’s gouged claw marks into his cheeks, and his teeth are longer. They’re spreading along his entire mouth, though the new ones are still small enough to fit almost comfortably on the right side of his mouth.

“Jesus, Josh, did my blood do  _that?_ ” His anger is pulled away for just a moment as he looks at his friend’s face, shocked into anguish again. How could his- Can his blood really do that much work, so quick? Maybe so. It was the first human meal that Josh has had since the last time he sucked on Chris’ neck. And maybe it’s not just the blood itself that affected him- The violence and hunger behind the act could have a contributing factor, too. Regardless, this isn’t fucking  _good_ , and it further spurns Chris to forgive Josh immediately and work on getting them away.

But he can’t. Especially if Josh’s mind is deteriorating even more. He hates how much his temperament towards Josh has turned into a game of pretend- He must be reprimanded like a child, or a dog. It’s sick, and he hates when he catches himself talking to Josh like he’s lesser, like he’s not human, but… It’s true. He _isn’t_  human, and his comprehension skills are a little to be desired.

He’s gotta make it clear that what Josh did isn’t okay. So he resolutely refuses to let Josh see his back, and he refuses to speak to him. He knows how much Josh likes his words, finds comfort from them, especially when they’re calm, or rarely, happy.

Josh tries to pull him a few times, whining, and when he’s met with stony silence, he says quietly, “Chris? Chris.” When that doesn’t work, he speaks in fucking  _Hannah’s_  voice, soft-spoken repetitions of his name. Chris almost responds on instinct, anguish washing through him at hearing her voice, but he just clicks his jaw shut and looks away from Josh.

He hasn’t _apologized_ , even in his own way, so Chris can’t let it go. For Josh’s sake, he tells himself.

Chris is forced to wait for an agonizingly slow thirty seconds before Josh’s head is in his lap, the soft points of his antlers digging into his thighs. He gets another long, slow whine as Josh looks up at him. If it weren’t for the blood, teeth, and other disfigurements, Chris could almost pretend this is another one of their later-night _‘you’re warm and I need a lap to lay on, bro’_  sessions.

He swallows back the tears that threaten to spill over at the thought. He can’t think about that right now. Is this-?

Josh is trying to apologize. His clawed hands are turns inwards, mouth closed as much as it can be in this state. His eyes are wide, and after a moment he gets a mumbled “Chris. Hurt.”

Chris looks down at him and nods slowly, trying to ignore the fear he feels even looking at Josh right now. “I know it’s hard. But you can’t- I’m not your  _meal.”_

Josh  looks at him for a long time, so long that Chris isn’t sure if Josh is even  _present_  right now. It’s happened before. His mind maybe splaying in weird directions of instinct and human. But also…  _before._  There’s been many a day since Chris met Josh where his mind just wasn’t on this earth. He’s gotten used to it.

“Josh. Listen to me, c’mo-”

Josh gives a chitter like he’s figured something out, and then he’s pulling Chris up off the furs, shifting so he can bridal carry Chris. Chris splutters and tries to hit at his chest, expletives falling from his mouth in an attempt to regain _any_  control of the situation. He can’t help it- He _is_  scared, terrified that Josh has somehow lost it completely today. He’s about to die, or slowly be eaten, and Josh’s soft and comforting chitters are just a ploy to get his prey to calm down.

 _“Warm.”_  Josh says, like that means fucking anything.

Chris stops his stream of vitriol for one moment, before he shouts, “I was fucking warm on my _blankets_! Put me the fuck down, Washington! I swear to god, you’re fucking _pushing_  your limits here!”

The half-wendigo has the audacity to look vaguely amused as he starts to carry Chris out of the cavern. It just makes Chris angrier and he continues with his weak hits, and Josh repeats his small  _warm warm_  croons whenever he gets too violent. He looks like he’s apologetic, all the same, and by the time they get back up to the surface, the moon high and full, Chris’ struggles have all but stopped.

“You’re a _fucking_  idiot. Why are you such an idiot? Why on earth did I have to be saddled with the one person that pulls the shit you do? Why,  _why_  did the universe decide ‘oh hey, Chris, by the way, you know your movie-loving pal? Yeah, the super chill one? Well, not he’s a fucking _crazy_  wendigo who wants to  _eat you.’_  Thanks, Universe. You really did me a solid.” Josh clearly has no idea what Chris is saying, his head cocked while still looking amused at how  _angry_  Chris is.

He just keeps walking, his thick skin not caring about the chilly breeze that is leaving Chris in goosebumps. He shivers, and tries not to see how pale Josh is getting.

They walk for a good two miles, and about halfway through the trip, Chris can’t help the hope blossoming in his chest. He  _knows_  this area. He does. It’s close to the main lodge, but still far enough away that he’s not sure where exactly Josh is planning to take him. Clearly, he’s not taking him to the little stream.

It makes sense when then finally come to a clearing and the small cabin that Mike and Jess must have gone to comes into view. “Warm.” Josh repeats softly, and Chris can’t help but give a huff of acknowledgement. Yeah. It’ll be way fucking warmer than the caverns.

“Take me to the couch. Fuck, fuck _yes._  Fine, fine, I forgive you, we’re good, but if you don’t put me on a soft surface in two fucking second, I’m gonna kick your ass with my broken leg.”

Josh is good to him, does as he’s told as soon as they slip inside the cabin. It’s chilly, and there’s a couple of broken windows. But it’s better than the stuffy cavern that smelled of rot and mold. He huffs as he pushes his body into the cushions, relishing in the feeling of how soft they are. There’s an overshirt on the back of one of the couches. Mike’s. It almost sours Chris’ mood, but he refuses to think about it. Healthy, he knows.

“We’re staying here. Don’t you fucking  _dare_  take me back to the mine’s, Josh. I swear.” He’s met with nothing, and after a second, he lifts his head to look for Josh. He sees nothing for a few moments, and then all of a sudden, Josh is climbing over the back of the couch, claws digging into the fabric.

“Hey, hey! Don’t fuck up my couch!” he exclaims, and it must scare Josh, because a second later, he’s tumbled from his position, landing on Chris’ chest with a heavy  _oof._  Chris coughs and tries to push him away- he may be getting worryingly skinny, but he’s still fucking heavy-, but is distracted by what’s hanging from Josh’s mouth.

A package of jerky. An entire package of already-cooked and dried jerky. Something that isn’t raw and fucking disgusting and reek of death. Fine, Josh can stay on his chest like a fucked up sleep paralysis monster. Chris snatches the package of jerky from Josh, narrowly avoiding the growled snap of teeth in his direction.

“Fuck off. I get first dibs.” He’ll share, but first? He’s getting half the package.

The first bite of jerky leaves him in tears, and there’s no pride lost because of it. He grabs a handful of the strips before tossing the package back to Josh, ignoring his disgusting sounds as he snuffles and eats.

Fine. Josh is forgiven. He’s done well enough to make up for hurting him. 


	8. Eclipse

The presence of _couches_  and  _kitchens_ and other telltale signs of humanity does a lot to lessen the constant panic and fear in Chris’ being. So many of his issues with his situation involved the lack of warmth, food, and water. Being so hinged on Josh’s care was a terrifying experience. Not because he doesn’t trust Josh (or well, he  _used_  to), but… How could he stop the paranoia that something was going to go wrong, when Josh was a half-beast?

He had Josh help him stumble into the kitchen, and then grab him a stool so he can prop his leg onto it. It’s awkward standing with his leg at a near ninety degree angle, but they’re all past awkwardness at this point, and Chris wants a fucking  _meal._

Luckily for them, there are some spices from whoever stayed here last (not Mike or Jess). He was lucky enough to find some bouillon cubes, as well as some old spices. They are, admittedly, probably past their expiration date on f _reshness,_ but Chris really isn’t concerned with making a meal from Olive Garden, here. He just wants a home-cooked meal.

There’s no chicken, which fucking sucks, but there’s flour, so he makes up a pot of dumplings in chicken broth. Filling, satisfactory, and it makes the entire cabin smell like fucking  _heaven._

When it’s made, he has to goad Josh into sitting like a normal person at the table. Whether he would go below it or on top of it, the crouching half-wendigo didn’t seem to fucking  _get_ it until Chris himself sat in the chair across from him, raising an eyebrow.

Josh looks at him from his hunched spot in the chair, purring as loud as he can. It seems like the few hours in the cabin have done him good, too. He’s lost many of the twitchy movements that were freaking Chris out earlier, and his noises have been pushed back into conversational chitters and soft purrs and whines. He hasn’t heard a shriek in hours, and  _fuck_  that’s a relief.

“I dunno how coordinated you are with those claws of yours…. But try not to make a mess?” Chris says when Josh leans forward to sniff at the bowl in front of him, his cloudy eyes widening in interest. He gets a mumbled  _Chris_  in response, before Josh picks up a fork and deftly stabs one of Chris’ oblong dumplings with ravenous movements. Chris is pretty sure using the utensil is on auto-pilot, but he’s stopped from thinking anything else because Josh _trills_ as he eats.

He eats like normal- Nasty sounds and nasty movements in his fruitless attempt to heal some of his hunger. But the happy little trills are new, especially in response to bland as fuck flour dumplings. Still, even Chris can’t the moan that escapes his throat a few times, either, considering how long it’s been since he ate anything except for raw fucking meat. The broth helps his throat, too, shredded from how many times he’s been screaming, and all those nasty particles that Chris wasn’t really aware of until he was in a cave full of an oppressive atmosphere.

“Chris…” Josh mumbles, and Chris wants to walk over there and clamp his loud as fuck chewing mouth up. But he doesn’t. He’s patient. He raises an eyebrow and waits, because it seems like there’s more. Josh swallows his mouthful and eventually says, “...Not meat…?”

“No. I mean, the broth has got, like, chicken particles in it or whatever, but nope. Just flour and spices and shit. See? You  _can_  eat a meal without meat it in. Look at that.” He mockingly claps his hands, letting out a bark of a laugh when Josh rolls his eyes and gets back to his food.

There’s a mild draft of cool pre-spring air coming into the cabin. Chris will have to see if there’s anything he can do to board up the windows at some point. He huffs as he realizes the reason for the windows being busted is also the reason that Mike thought Josh had killed Jessica; wendigos. It always comes back to the damn demonic creatures.

The thought of his dead friends makes the dumpling in his mouth turn from a delicious meal to a reminder that Chris is alive while everyone else is fucking  _dead_. 

Chris can remember the anguish and anger on Mike’s face when they tied Josh up, the random bouts of confusion and fear darting across Josh’s face. He hadn’t wanted to tie Josh up, but there was no other _way_ , not when his actions and mind was nothing but a swirl of psychotic behavior wrapped in some fucked up revenge prank. Chris had spent more than one night cursing Mike’s dead fucking body for how he treated Josh, blaming him for his death. But- How could Mike have known? How could any of them had known there was a monster greater than a grief on the mountain that night?

Chris’ fork clinks into the bowl.

“Do you even remember?” Chris asks softly, glancing up from his bowl to look Josh up and down. Other than his insistence on using  _Chris_  as a constant crooning noise or his periodic mention of Hannah, Chris has no way of knowing if Josh can even remember humanity. Can even remember what led him here, sitting at the table with a mouth full of jagged teeth.

Maybe the events of the mountain are still, a month later, too fresh. Maybe he just hasn’t had time to deal with it, yet. But just hinting at the mountain fills him with a deep anger. Chris still doesn’t know where that anger should be pointed- it always changes, something to blame, someone to scapegoat.

Josh glances up, some of the thick broth smeared across his mouth. He tilts his head a little and emits a soft, confused noise.

“Do you even  _remember_. Anything other than your damn hunger and the mutations? Or is it all gone? Clean slate. Some small little points of  _this is Chris_  and  _Hannah was fucked up_ and that’s it?” Chris wants to reevaluate his opinion on Josh’s state of mind. There’s a film of red covering his thoughts, and he doesn’t even know where it  _came from._  “Fuck, and here I thought you were better off dead than- than this. But nah. You might be hungry, but you’re in  _heaven_. You don’t even remember that they all died because of  _you.”_

It’s not true and Chris knows it. It’s no one’s fault- humanity is too complex to place the blame on any one of them. Each of them may have had a contributing role, and every day Chris is surrounded by small reminders of  _if I didn’t do this…_  and  _if Josh had done that…_  A consistent mixture of blame and ifs and buts. He knows that no one can be blamed, least of all Josh. Maybe the wendigos can, but even they were people once, too, driven only to do as their biology commands.

He has no right to blame Josh, or get angry at him. Especially when Josh has suffered the fate he has. Especially when Josh’s actions never would have happened if his damn sisters hadn’t died because of someone else’s stupid prank.

It doesn’t matter, though. The anger feels good, and seeing Josh react, flinch backwards in his seat, it’s- It shouldn’t be cathartic. But it is. It feels good to get a human rise out of Josh, regardless of if he deserves it.

“Do you remember making me choose? Between Ash and you? And being forced to watch you get torn apart? Those were your  _design_ , Josh. Those were- Do you even know how much you’ve hurt me? Do you even  _care?_ ”

Well. The good feelings of the cabin were fun while they lasted. Chris watches numbly as Josh flinches again, something creeping in finally behind those blank filmy eyes. And what creeps in isn’t anger, isn’t sadness- it’s realization, self-hatred and guilt.

He should say sorry. Should touch his hands and apologize and tell him that his anger was uncalled for and he shouldn’t take it out on the only other survivor of their terrible mixture of bad luck and stupidity. 

Chris should feel bad as he watches Josh jerkily get up from the table, movements too hurried to worry about looking human. 

He doesn’t. 

He sits at the table in silence, and continues to stare into space well after he hears a door slam shut and the panicked breaths of someone trying not to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so short. I've had a hell of a week, y'all. I'll make it up to you this weekend, I promise.


	9. Waxing

There’s a moment before a torrent of emotions pour out of his body where he’s hyper aware of everything. The soft warmth coming from the stove, the distant sound of dripping water from outside the cabin. His own breath, the smooth and even cycle of in-out, in-out slowly growing more erratic, louder and more jittery.

It’s a single moment, nothing big in the grand scheme of things, but the _order_ of everything takes him by surprise. Everything has its own little function, nothing chaotic, and then he’s thinking of-

Ashley’s soft brown hair, curling just slightly where it falls out from under her beanie. Hannah’s wide doe eyes, hiding nothing and showing everything, showing how much she loves and feels for the world. Mike’s stiff body language, as though he’s trying not to show how much he feels, and transversely, aborted movements to touch, to hold, to comfort everybody in their time of need. Jess’ quick mouth and wit and the way her mouth would turn upwards just slightly when she was  _actually_  happy. Emily’s no-nonsense words, blunt and to the point with terrifying accuracy, and how welcome it is to cut the bullshit sometimes. Beth’s soothing hands and judgmental gaze whenever people were being unsatisfactory in a way only she could decide. Sam’s endless imagery-filled words of comfort, the way she’d cook for people when they got sad, as though filling up a stomach was the best way to get better. Matt’s kindness and cluelessness and yeah, Chris didn’t like him very much, but he could appreciate what he could do for someone like Emily.

A single moment, and he’s thinking of-

Josh passed out on the couch, his mouth open as he snores, and Chris is forced to push him awake, which earns him a slap and quip, and Chris just has to ignore the way Josh flinched when he was touched. Josh with shaking hands and a panicked look, but his priority is always making sure that Chris is having a good day, is in a good mood. Josh with skin even more beautifully browned from the sun as he sits on a beach and hands Chris a cocktail, the smile on his face more beautiful than any of the surrounding Caribbean sights. Josh sleeping in Chris’ lap, his breath smelling of booze and weed and his hand clenched in Chris’ shirt, like he’s afraid he’ll disappear. 

Josh’s entrails hanging out of the bottom of his torso, the mixture of his screams and the whirring, gut-wrenching sound of the blade piercing the air like a tornado siren. Josh’s absent eyes and tearful blubbering as Mike roughly tied him to the pole, and his eyes were pleading  _pleading_  with Chris to do something that was less crazy than Josh.

It’s just one moment.

And then his breathing overloads him, the hard  _thump thump_  of his heart moving in disarray and his head a massive crack of thunder. There is nothing calm in the way every emotion collides into a bundle of  _angerfearsadnessanguish_ , all together, all at once. He doesn’t understand how humans have ever been able to label emotions into small, neat little constraints. There is no end to  _sad_ that doesn’t merge with  _happy._ Nothing so opposite or binary.

Chris knows he shouldn’t feel like this. That if he had spent the last month sorting through his emotions and the events of the mountain with any logical care, then this wouldn’t all pool up into a toxic mix of stagnant water. He’d be able to deal with himself dammit, instead of floundering to find the end of a ball of tangled yarn.

If he goes and confronts Josh now, he’s not sure he won’t just end up yelling, screaming at him and projecting his own self-hatred on the half-wendigo. He’s not sure Josh won’t just finally break down and shed the human visage, realize that Chris isn’t worth keeping alive.

There’s this wet  _crying_  sound and he realizes it’s him, tears falling into the half-eaten bowl of dumplings.

He has to confront Josh. But- Not yet. He needs to calm down. It takes him a few minutes to get up from the chair and steady himself with only one leg and a body bruised to the point that he looks like a plum in some areas. But that just means more time to focus on something other than his emotional pain and anger. He washes both his and Josh’s dishes, putting the leftovers back into the pot. He’ll cover it up later, so they don’t waste any of their food. God knows it would suck to starve after all the effort Chris has put into staying alive.

He washes the dishes by hand and cleans the counters off, and by the time he’s finished, twenty minutes have passed and his heart rate has evened out. He’s still livid, still upset and aching in a way that no human should ever feel, but it’s softer, now. Like a constant pulse of feeling rather than the sharp overload of pain that, say, his broken leg would cause.

Chris thinks, quietly, that perhaps the pain behind every emotion is the reality of things. That the emotions and the words that humanity has described are nothing more than hopeful facades that there is something more than the underlying pain of this world. Happiness is a fool’s word. Anger is a bitter man’s word. They all mean the same thing, when you get right down to it. A slow coalescing spiral of pain, intermingled with an agony so great that the original pain can feel like something other than the hell it truly was.

Josh’s face on his lap, laughing with him, hugging him when they haven’t seen each other in a long time… Those are all… It’s. Their function is to remind Chris how much he hurts, now. He felt happy when they happened, before the pain of his new reality set in, but now they’re nothing more than bitter reminders that at one point, one faraway, maybe made-up point in his too-short life, he and Josh weren’t the sad creatures they are now.

He accidentally breaks a plate in the sink, but it hardly phases him. He just picks up the pieces and throws them out, and hopes they have enough plates between the two of them to not miss its absence.

For some reason, Chris remembers the time him and the Washingtons (plus Sam, of course), went on some camping trip back during sophomore year. Chris had complained endlessly when his phone lost cell service, to the point that he got made fun of his technology addiction for hours and hours. Chris had been furious at some points and  _god_ how petty did they all used to be, that an absent cell phone was enough to bring him to anger? Compared to now? It’s like an entirely different planet.

He’s torturing himself with his memories of them all. 

A second ticks into a minute ticks into five before Chris musters up the energy to make his way down the hall, slowly, towards the bathroom. He has to talk to Josh. He knows he- He fucked up. He fucked up, and it’s his fault, and Josh didn’t deserve that  _shit._

He doesn’t want to apologize.

Chris presses his ear against the bathroom door and hears choked-off sobs and croons. The door is locked. He knocks slowly and the sounds stop, except for shuffling before the door is unlocked and opened, Josh skittering back to sit against the wall next to the tub.

The apologies and words and anger that were bubbling up from Chris’ throat die where he stands, because blood is running down Josh’s face in rivulets. The gouges in his cheeks are not only bleeding again, but the velvet of his growing antlers hang down in blood strips of visceral gore, blood flowing freely from the opened veins. Logically, Chris knows this would have happened- He’s seen enough Discovery channel documentaries to know that the velvet wasn’t permanent. But it’s still a shock to see his friend’s tear and blood-stained face, so soon after practically yelling that everything that happened was his fault.

“O-oh Josh. Josh, I’m- Fuck, I’m so sorry.” Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s hobbling over to Josh and pulling him up into a hug, then pulling him back to brush his thumbs over his bloody cheeks and grimace. “Why did you hurt yourself? Josh- C’mon, it-”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, didn’ mean to, didn’- I’m sorry. So sorry. Oh, I’m sorry.” Josh mumbles absently, and it’s then that Chris can see how absent his eyes are. Not in the way that they go when his wendigo instincts kick in. No, this is more the haunted and absent look he had when they were tying him up, when he’s had psychotic breaks. His gaze is utterly human and utterly broken, barely there. His gaze keeps darting and landing on things that aren’t there, and Chris really hopes he isn’t- Isn’t  _seeing_  people. Hearing anyone berate him and tell him anything nasty.

“No, no it’s- I shouldn’t have yelled. It’s not our fault. It isn’t, I just- I was being selfish, pushing all that onto you. You don’t- You’re recovering. I shouldn’t get mad at  _you_ , of all people.” Chris tries to brush away some of the tears, but Josh flinches back like it hurts. It probably does- it’s hard to tell what is and what isn’t broken flesh right now.

Chris glances towards the shower, then tries to manhandle Josh in that direction. It’s fucking hard, considering he has to shuffle, and with an armful of skinny wendigo shaking, it’s nearly impossible. But at least Josh isn’t useless. He seems to get that Chris is angling him into the tub and does the work for Chris, stepping over the divide and then just. Sitting down and drawing his knees up.

“Okay. We’re- We’ll talk about this shit later. Okay? Okay. You’re- fuck, you need to stop hurting yourself, Josh. I know you’re freaking out and I’m sorry, it was fucked up of me, but  _stop clawing your cheeks._  Christ, you’re scaring me.” He leans down to verify that Josh is still here, is listening to Chris, and is pleased that the wild movements of his eyes have stopped, at least a little. Good. “Okay. Uh. Take- Take your clothes off. We’re just- We’re trashing it. They’re gross, you smell bad, and there’s soap here, to clean your wounds out.”

Oh, how Chris can’t wait to take a shower of his own. But he’s definitely going to wait until Josh is clean, non-bloody and at least semi-lucid before he leaves him in favor of hot water. Maybe a bath, considering his leg.

Chris has to ask Josh to remove his clothes again before the man actually does it, his movements jittery but absent. With luck, the outburst both of them had will tire them the fuck out and they can actually sleep tonight-

Wait. Daytime. Josh has kept him on a nocturnal schedule, but he hardly even noticed it because of the caves. Well. It might be harder to stick to that now.

Now’s not the time to think about that, but it’s better than watching Josh slowly undress, better than seeing the way his dark skin is becoming oh-so-pale, the way his previously thick and toned legs and body are now shrivelling into lean and unhealthy proportions. Seeing him stretch out his bare legs makes it obvious that he’s grown a couple inches at least, and the way his bare shoulders and back curve over themselves even when he’s just sitting show that his body is slowly morphing itself into the near-quadruped formation that the wendigos walk and crawl in.

Better to think about times when the underlying pain that exists in everything isn’t so loud, isn’t so noisy or obvious. When the pain is just the thought of sleeping next to Josh in a bed, rather than watching thick blood run rivulets down his cheeks and chin. 

Josh hiccups and whines to himself as Chris busies himself with turning the shower on. The immediate spray of freezing cold water causes Josh to scream and flinch, and Chris curses himself for doing that, urging it into something warmer while he apologizes over and over again, trying to calm him once more.

The longer he sits in the bath, the more the human presence in his eyes diminishes. By the time the water is warm enough for Chris to take the shower head down and start dousing Josh in water, his eyes are absent, just cloudy pools of near-catatonic animalism.

For a few second, Chris feels a soft stab of envy that Josh is able to turn himself off like this, able to retreat to the back of his mind and let the monster reign for just a few minutes. But that’s a cruel thing to think, on both of their ends. It’s no blessing for Josh, and the thought of rest is torture to Chris right now.

Instead, he busies himself in rinsing the water off his face and body slowly, enough that he can at least take stock in how the wounds are. His cheeks have deep scratches, the worst being where he dipped into the wounds of his fucked up mouth, creating jagged openings that leave his teeth and gums open to the world. Chris clucks his tongue and hopes that heals on its own, because he really _really_  doesn’t know enough about first aid to fix this.

The strips of bloody velvet take a little bit more work, with Chris having to pull the strings and flaps of flesh from the bony antlers. He doesn’t think it hurts Josh- especially since Josh seems more intent on stealing the strips of bloody velvet from his hands and  _eating_ them like something out of a horror movie- but it’s still awkward and disgusting.

The end result is nice, though. Instead of the soft brown fuzz covering the points, they’re now just a smooth ivory. Just one point for each, but they’ve grown a good five to six inches. Maybe next year he’ll get another point in them, and slowly develop a rack. Chris can’t help but think that they  _do_  look nice, especially once he smooth warm water through Josh’s hair and the hardened and greasy ends become soft and smooth, parting around the antlers.

Chris let’s Josh eat his own damn discarded flesh, mostly because it keeps the half-wendigo content. Instead of the empty and terrifying look he had before, he’s now crooning softly to himself as he chews and eats, which makes it way easier for Chris to wash him. He finds some soap and shampoo in one of the cabinets and thanks whatever deity  _hasn’t_ damned them all to hell for his luck. The hot water is just making it obvious how bad Josh smells. After almost twenty minutes of intense scrubbing, with Chris’ thoughts going to the back-burner so he doesn’t have to think about being that close to Josh’s junk, he smells like soap, not like a monster.

“Okay.” Chris says softly, as soon as he’s certain the soap has been rinsed away and Josh is  _clean._  

Thoughts of rivers of blood and cleansing rivers fill his thoughts, and he wonders if it’s pretentious enough to see the grime and dirt leaving Josh as a sign of a baptism. Probably. Maybe. Chris is clearly going insane, why not add religious psychosis to the mix? He’d love to see Josh the cannibalistic wendigo bowing down and saying a Hail Mary, and it’s  _that_  thought that leaves him weak from laughter, the deranged sound bubbling up from his chest and making Josh look up at him in confusion. 

He turns the shower off and pushes himself up. He calms down his laughter, shaking his head. “It’s nothing- Jus’. You wouldn’t get it. Stay here. I’m gonna get a towel, and maybe some clothes. Uh, don’t run around  _naked_?” He’s not even sure if Josh is present enough to understand him right now, but he hopes he got the gist of it.

Which of course means, almost a half an hour later, after Chris has had to hobble and holler for Josh to  _put the clothes on now, damnit, don’t fucking chitter at me,_  Chris is exhausted, annoyed, but also… In a much happier mood than before. Not that he’s happy, but there’s something about Josh’s playful enthusiasm that calms Chris down. It’s obvious Josh is still hiding the pain, pushing out the playful side of the monster, instead, but for now? Chris is grateful. He’s too tired and overworked to talk about what happened, yet.

Even with the pain behind everything, there is something to say about the sheer happiness and comfort a hot shower can bring a man. Him and Josh will have their guilt-ridden discussion tomorrow, when the two of them are mentally present enough to discuss where blame lies and who should be sorry of what.

For now? He’s going to sleep in the damn soft as fuck bed, bathed and clean and both him and Josh smelling like  _humans_  again. And he won’t tell anyone that when Josh casually pulls Chris to him, his lips grazing Chris’ neck as he sleeps and spoons him, he sleeps better, like the anguish of the world has been pushed a little further away.


	10. Waning

Josh wakes up to the smell of Chris all around him. Even despite the foul soap from the shower, Chris still smells like how he should, his own unique scent that tingles on Josh’s memories and makes him push further, nosing into his neck. He’s wrapped around Chris, and his entire body feels heavy in a good way, soft purring vibrations coming from his own throat.

He can- It’s hard to remember They went to bed at sunrise, but he can’t remember much before that. He remembers sitting in the tub, remembers that his antlers are beautiful and complete now, if just a little small. He squirms to sit up, touching at the smooth, unmarred bone coming from his forehead. Half of him is in love. The other half wants to wrench the bone from his skull and watch the blood pool over his eyes.

He huffs and tries to recall. Tries to pull up the human ways of thinking that are slowly but surely becoming more and more enshrouded in film and fog. He’s missing something. He fell too deeply into the monster’s mind last night, that’s the only explanation he has for waking up in a bed with Chris and not knowing why.

A whine nearly escapes his mangled lips and he has to slap a clawed hand over his mouth to stop it from leaving. No need to wake Chris up. Chris will just confuse his mind and make him unsure of what he is or isn’t and-

Oh. He’s mad at Chris. He can feel the deep red-rage of the monster within him, wanting to shred and tear and hide. He can feel the human emotions, so difficult to extract, pulsing with a white-hot need to confront, to yell, to understand.

Josh is  _livid_  at Chris, and underneath it all are the normal feelings of guilt and anguish that have become the core defining trait of  _Josh Washington_. He huffs, squirming, before he pushes himself back down into the mattress, staring at the back of Chris’ head intently.

It takes him nearly a half an hour of intense thinking until he remembers the conversation from the night previous. Remembers Chris’ eyes, so full of hate as he blamed Josh, asked him if he remembered. Well, now he does. He can remember slamming the bathroom door, remembers gouging his claws into his cheeks until they bled. Remembers Hannah’s voice hissing at him that he’s  _hopeless, disgusting, a freak and a waste of space._

Remembers the prank, and how  _funny_ it was to watch Chris see him ‘cut’, remembers how angry he was all at once. Oh, he was so angry, that entire weekend. So angry, and so lost, and now? Now he’s not sure if he’s better or worse. It’s hard to feel the emotions that were once so obvious, now that the animal inside him wants to mellow everything out into bland instincts. Hard to remember past fleeting images.

The thought of delving deep into his psyche and extracting not only his memories, but the emotions that go with them? It’s overwhelming, uncomfortable… He’s certain he’ll go even more insane if he overloads his transforming mind with all of that shit right now. But what else is there to do? He’ll lose it. He can feel himself losing the memories and the humanity that Chris wants him to have.

And how can he save this relationship if he forgets? Chris was so… so livid at the possibility of Josh forgetting. Maybe because it isn’t fair that Chris must remember what Josh did, when Josh himself can’t remember anything past the all-encompassing guilt. So even if he doesn’t want to remember, wants to bed down in the wendigo’s thought patterns and relax, he has to dig and think and remember. Fuck.

The fact that deciding to do this takes him minutes, minutes of working slowly through the surface thoughts and desires just to make a decision, is all the proof he needs. He has to do this if he wants to stay human. He can’t deny himself anything, can’t keep pushing away and away and away.

Pushing down his emotions is what put him down the path of becoming a monster in the first place.

Quietly, so he doesn’t wake up Chris, he shimmies from the bed. He doesn’t hide the way his movements jitter and bounce, nor does he even bother to walk upright. Chris is asleep- It doesn’t matter if he moves the way the monster inside wants him to.

He lays down on the raggedy couch, and after taking a couple minutes to breathe slowly, to let himself relax and calm down, he pushes at the mental walls he’s constructed over the years, digs deep in beyond the wendigo’s instinct-filled mind, and  _remembers._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all! Some people have been doing fantastic fucking artwork for Sunrise! Holy shit, I'm FLATTERED!!!!!
> 
> [Here's](http://buckycurtis.tumblr.com/post/132839675529/ihavethisurl-theres-a-shriek-its-like-the) a beautiful comic-esque one that really brings to life the scenery and the mood of the fic!
> 
> [Here's](http://buckycurtis.tumblr.com/post/132829742829/i-havent-done-any-fanart-in-so-loong-hahaha-im-so) a wonderful characterization of our bb wendigo Josh, in all his lovely glory!!!
> 
> [Here's](http://buckycurtis.tumblr.com/post/132636501314/patchvvork-ok-so-initially-i-drew-the-first) a super groovy piece that's inspired by the scene in which Josh feeds Chris the raw deer meat (as well as an AU scenario in which Josh tries to turn Chris into a wendigo as well!)
> 
> Thank you guys so much! If y'all wanna draw, or write for this verse, please feel free and PLEASE TAG ME IN IT SO I CAN SEE??????? I'm so flattered y'all like this?? Wow.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: falls head first into the Until Dawn fandom
> 
> ANYWAYS, feel free to say hello to me on [Tumblr.](buckycurtis.tumblr.com) Send me messages, questions, or just plain follow. I post a lot of unpublished snippets that never make it to AO3, there. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy.


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